Coleridge, SAMUEL TAYLOR, was born at Ottery St Mary, Devonshire, October 21, 1772, where his father was vicar, and master of the grammar-school. He was the youngest of ten children of his father's second marriage. A singularly precocious child, he had read the Arabian Nights in his fourth year; but he said of himself, 'I never thought as a child.' On his father's death he was sent, in his ninth year, to be educated at Christ's Hospital, where he had Charles Lamb for a school companion. He was poorly fed, and badly taught; but he plunged with eagerness into a whole library of literature, and read Homer and Virgil for the mere pleasure of it. Remaining at Christ's for eight years, he became head of the school, and showed a remarkable capacity for assimilating all sorts of knowledge. He was a mental rover from his boyhood onwards, with a very miscellaneous intellectual appetite. At school he translated the hymns of Synesius, studied works on medicine in Latin, on metaphysics in Greek, and fell in love with the sister of one of his companions. His last years at school, however, were years of suffering. He used to bathe in the New River, plunging into the water with his clothes on, and after a swim, resumed his games, or returned to his books, without changing his garments. The inevitable result was rheumatic fever and other ailments. While at school he had a passing attraction not only to his schoolmate's sister, but to the shoemaker's craft. This was a short-lived fancy; and in October 1791 he passed to Jesus College, Cambridge, a few months after Wordsworth had taken his B.A. degree, and left the university. During his first year at college he did good work in classics, and became one of four selected candidates for the Craven scholarship in 1793; but his bent not being mathematical, and having little chance of winning the chancellor's medal, he gave himself up to general literature. He also became interested in politics, took a strong position on the Liberal side, and won distinction, even thus early, as a marvellous talker. He got into difficulties in Cambridge, through extravagance in furnishing his rooms, became depressed, and in a panic fled to London, where he enlisted in the 15th Dragoons, under the name of Silas Tomkyns Comberbach (a name assumed to conceal and yet reveal his identity as S. T. C.). He never could learn, however, how to manage a horse, never rose out of the awkward squad; and a chance accident disclosing his knowledge of classics, led to his discovery by his friends, and to his being bought out of the service. At the close of the summer term, he went on a visit to Oxford; and there, at Balliol College, he for the first time met Southey. In July he took a pedestrian tour in North Wales, after which he went to Bristol, and there again met both with Southey and with Robert Lovell, the latter of whom had just married a Miss Fricker, to whose sister (Edith) Southey had engaged himself. Coleridge at once followed his example, and became engaged to another sister (Sara); and amongst them they formed the Quixotic plan of emigration to the banks of the Susquehanna in America, where they were to form a 'Pantisocracy'—an ideal community on the principles of Communism. Two hours of daily labour were to suffice for providing the necessities of life, the rest of their time being devoted to intellectual work and social converse. They were to have all things in common; and, as a result of the experiment, were to bring in a golden age, for themselves and others. It was a dream; and it passed, as dreams do.
Coleridge had left Cambridge without taking a degree. In the late autumn of 1794 he went up to London, and there renewed his acquaintance with Lamb. But in December he was brought back to Bristol by Southey, who feared he might come under some new fascination in the metropolis. He had to find the means of livelihood, not on the Susquehanna, but in the west of England; and he began a course of miscellaneous lecturing on literary and political subjects. It was now that he made the acquaintance of Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller, who became so kind a friend. Cottle offered to publish a volume of poems for him, giving him thirty guineas for the copyright; and, vexed at his delay in completing the volume, subsequently offered him a guinea for every hundred lines of verse he would write, after this first volume was printed. With this promise, and what he thought provision for life, he ventured to marry; and in October 1795 Sara Fricker became Mrs Coleridge. They went at once to a small cottage, which is still to be seen at Clevedon in Somerset. Here, however, Coleridge did not long remain. We find him in Bristol in December getting his first volume of poems ready for the press (it was published in April 1796), and at the same time attempting to start a weekly journal to be called the Watchman, which was to contain general news, parliamentary reports, literary intelligence, and reviews. In his efforts to float this journal he went north to Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, &c., to procure subscribers. He succeeded in starting it, Cottle being the publisher; but it only reached its tenth number, and failed—the generous publisher bearing all the loss. Coleridge next tried the experiment of preaching in the Unitarian chapels around Bristol. Cottle gives an account of his appearance in one of these at Bath on a Sunday, 'in blue coat and white waistcoat,' to discourse on the corn laws and the powder tax. This eccentricity did not last. Another friend, and a somewhat remarkable man—Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey—provided him with a small house and garden in the village of Stowey; and there Coleridge went to live, in January 1797, with his wife and child (whom he had named Hartley, from his admiration for the philosophy of David Hartley). Poole also very generously raised a sum of money to provide an annuity for his friend.
Before this date Coleridge had made the acquaintance of Wordsworth. In the early spring of 1796 Wordsworth went up to Bristol from Racedown in Dorsetshire, to see both Coleridge and Southey; and, in a list of authors with whom he was acquainted, drawn up by Coleridge in March of that year, Wordsworth's name occurs. In the following year Coleridge went down from Stowey to Racedown to return the visit. As late as 1845 Mrs Wordsworth gave a graphic account to Sara Coleridge of her father's 'leaping over a gate, and bounding down a pathless field' on this first visit to Racedown. In July 1797 the Wordsworths moved from Racedown to Alfoxden, partly to be nearer Coleridge; and during that winter—which William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent in Somerset—Coleridge was their almost daily companion, roaming the woods and coombs of the Quantocks with them, or spending the night at Alfoxden. Wordsworth and he discussed together the principles of poetry, and planned a joint volume of verse to illustrate these principles; Wordsworth undertaking to invest commonplace themes with an imaginative interest, by disclosing what underlay them; and Coleridge taking supernatural or romantic incidents, humanising the stories so as to give new life to them. This was the origin of the Lyrical Ballads, the little volume which more than any other marked a new departure in poetical literature at the beginning of the 19th century. To it Coleridge contributed the Ancient Mariner. The book was published in 1798.
This meeting of Coleridge and Wordsworth was one of the most remarkable conjunctions of genius in the literary history of England, and the days they spent together in Somerset were perhaps the most joyous in their lives. While living at Nether Stowey, Coleridge kept up the practice of occasional preaching; and 'to prevent the necessity of his going into the ministry,' another admiring friend, Josiah Wedgwood, sent him a draft for £100. He returned it to the donor; but, soon afterwards, Coleridge accepted an annuity of £150 from the brothers Wedgwood, given to him on the condition that he would devote his life wholly to poetry and philosophy. In 1798 he started with the Wordsworths for Germany, crossing from Yarmouth to Hamburg; and while Wordsworth went to Goslar, Coleridge proceeded to Ratzeburg, to study the language and literature of the country. He moved on to Göttingen in January 1799. An interesting picture of his life in Germany is given in Satyrane's Letters. He returned to England in June; in August we find him at Stowey; and in September in Yorkshire with the Wordsworths. They had some idea of settling together, to renew the fellowship of the Quantock days. On the approach of winter, however, Coleridge went up to London, and there translated Wallenstein, one of the best bits of work he ever did. He now made fresh attempts at journalism, and wrote both prose and verse for the Morning Post; but, while some of his articles were admirable, he was such an irregular contributor, that his connection with the Post lasted only for a few months. In July he went north to Keswick, and took up his residence at Greta Hall, which Southey also made his home in 1803. At Keswick he continued his poetic work, and wrote the second part of Christabel. The Wordsworths had now been settled for some time at Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and there Coleridge was their frequent guest. Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere journal (ed. Knight, 1897) is full of allusions to his visits, and to the wonderful friendship of these days—a friendship immortalised in her brother's Stanzas written in a pocket copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence. But during the years he spent at Keswick, Coleridge came under the influence of what was henceforward to be the very curse of his life. His health had never been robust; rheumatism and neuralgia had tortured him; and, becoming his own doctor, he had recourse to the anodyne of opium. Little by little the habit grew, and the 'Kendal black drop' at length enslaved him. It injured his constitution and killed his imagination; it enfeebled his will and destroyed his sense of truth and honour. Few things in literature are so pathetic as his own lament over the deterioration of his nature, in his Dejection, an Ode. The details of this malady, and what it led to, have not yet been fully told.
Charles Lamb came to visit him at Keswick in 1802. In 1803 he started with the Wordsworths, on their memorable Scottish tour; but left them in a fortnight, and did wonderful feats of walking alone. He now thought of many plans for the recovery of health, which were really but plans to flee from his own shadow. The frugal Wordsworth forced him to accept a loan of £100. He was befriended by others, and he sailed for Malta in April 1804. There he became secretary to the governor, Sir Alexander Ball, an office for which he was entirely unsuited. His letters from abroad were hypochondriacal, valetudinarian, and sad in many ways. From Malta he went to Sicily, to Naples, and to Rome; but he had to leave Italy with some abruptness, an order, it is said, having been issued by Napoleon for his arrest, on the ground of some republican utterances years before; and the vessel in which he sailed being chased by a French cruiser, he threw all his papers (which included many of Wordsworth's poems) overboard. In August 1806 he returned to England. It is unnecessary to trace his subsequent wanderings to and fro, from
London to Keswick, to Penrith, to Coleorton, to Bristol, and to Bridgwater. At London he began what might have been a very remarkable series of lectures at the Royal Institution; but the experiment failed, for the same cause as previous ones had failed. He next thought of a fresh venture in journalism, and projected a new weekly paper, The Friend, for which he got a number of subscribers. It was printed at Penrith at his own expense. The Wordsworths took him into their house at Allan Bank, Grasmere, for the winter; and while Coleridge wrote most of the papers for The Friend himself, Wordsworth supplied him with some of the articles, and Sarah Hutchinson transcribed them week by week for the press. The paper lived from August 1809 to March 1810. The habit of opium-eating, which had now obtained a fatal ascendancy, could not be hidden from his friends; and at this juncture the Wordsworths, with the greatest delicacy, tried their utmost to help and to befriend him. They were misunderstood. He went up to London in 1810, and a strange cloud (the full story of which has yet to be told) obscured for a time the old relationship between the households. A partial estrangement lasted for some years, but was at length overcome by the friendly offices of Henry Crabb Robinson.
During Coleridge's later years in London he lived for four years with an old Bristol friend, John Morgan, at Hammersmith. He first tried the experiment of lecturing on Shakespeare. Occasionally his appearances were brilliant; more usually they were absolute failures. His conversational powers, however, seem to have increased, while his success as a lecturer diminished. All his life he had been in the habit of receiving gifts freely from such friends as the Beaumonts, and the Wedgwoods, from Stuart, and Wordsworth, and De Quincey; and though he occasionally did generous things to others, his neglect of the primal duties to his own family put a severe strain upon the tie that bound these friends to him.
The remaining years of his life were spent at Highgate with Mr and Mrs Gillman, whose kindness and consideration were unbounded. Though a wreck of his former self, the baleful opium-habit lessened, as Coleridge grew older, and he was able to do a good deal of miscellaneous writing. Some of his best prose work was written at Highgate. Though a dreamy and often unintelligible sage, he became a sort of oracle to a circle of enthusiastic admirers that gathered round him, and he completely fascinated the young men, who made their weekly pilgrimages to Gillman's house to hear him talk. As the years went on, his health somewhat improved, and he was even able to make occasional visits. In 1829 he took a short tour with the Wordsworths, accompanying the poet and his daughter to the Rhine. He died on the 23d July 1834, and was buried at Highgate.
As a Poet, Critic, and Philosopher (the three functions having been combined by Coleridge as they had never been by any previous Englishman) he was certainly a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of letters. For originality, insight, grace, musicalness, deft subtlety of thought, naturalness and charm of diction, he had only one rival amongst the poets of the Renaissance. It is true there have been greater poets in England, but there has been no greater poetical critic in British literature. Coleridge was a critic of poets (and the poets have, as a rule, been the best critics of each other). As yet there is no estimate of the literary revival which Coleridge and Wordsworth inaugurated that is superior to what the former wrote in his Biographia Literaria; and he was a philosophical critic, because he was a philosopher amongst the poets. He may be said to have inaugurated a new era by his poetic idealism, and by introducing the spirit of Plato alike into his poetry and his literary criticism. As a philosopher, however, he does not occupy the foremost place. He was too miscellaneous, too assimilative, and his intellect too meteoric and vagrant for speculative originality of the highest order. But he was one of the most suggestive of critics. Though not profoundly learned, he was very widely read; and he did more to leaven English philosophy, literature, and theology with the depth and the free spirit of Germany, than any one of his contemporaries. He vitalised whatever he discussed; and his writings will probably continue to kindle successive generations, and to fascinate them, even while they fail to convince.
Coleridge's most important works are: Poems (1796); Wallenstein (1800); The Friend (1809-10); Remorse (1813); Christabel, Kubla Khan, &c. (1816); The Statesman's Manual (1816); Sibylline Leaves (1817); Biographia Literaria (1817); Aids to Reflection (1825). Posthumously published—four volumes of Literary Remains (1836-38); Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit (1840); Essay on Method (1845).
The chief authorities in reference to Coleridge are Letters, Conversations, and Recollections, by Allsop (1836); Cottle's Early Recollections (1837); Gillman's Life (1838); Coleridge's Letters to Sir George and Lady Beaumont (1886); Mrs Sandford's Thomas Poole and his Friends (1889); the Biographia Literaria (1817); De Quincey's 'S. T. Coleridge,' in his Recollections of the Lakes (1857); Eliza Meteyard's Group of Englishmen, 1795-1815 (1871); the Memoirs of Wordsworth (1851); Southey's Life and Correspondence (1850); Lamb's Letters (1888); Mr Trail's Coleridge (1884); Brandl's S. T. Coleridge and the English Romantic School (1882); the short lives by Trail (1884) and Hall Caine (1887); the life by Dykes Campbell, prefixed to his admirable edition of the works (1893; separately published 1894); and the Letters, edited by Ernest Coleridge (1895).