Of these the most inspiring influence was probably that of the man who produced the least in bulk of great literature, Coleridge. He was, as it were, the Socrates of the time, the talker. Coleridge was born at the vicarage of Ottery St. Mary, in the Devonshire which Herrick and Keats so much disliked, on 21 October, 1772. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, was vicar and master of the Grammar School, and for goodness, learning, and ignorance of the world was compared by his son to Fielding's Parson Adams. Coleridge describes himself as a dreamy child, useless at games, "timorous, and a tell-tale," "despising most boys of my own age". "You can't think how ignorant these boys are!" said Scott, when asked, as a child, why he was not playing with his little neighbours. Like R. L. Stevenson, Coleridge suffered from night fears and visions of fever, born of "The Arabian Nights". He "had seen too many ghosts to believe in them". After the death of his father, who appreciated him, Coleridge went to Christ's Hospital in London (1782), and Lamb has described his life, and his early home-sickness at that painfully Spartan academy. Though he revived
by internal light,
The trees, the meadows, and his native stream,
while a schoolboy Coleridge's spirits were high; he made friends enough, Charles Lamb being the first; read widely; dipped, like other curious boys, into the dreams of the post-Christian Neoplatonists,—Iamblichus, the great authority on spiritualism, and Plotinus, so good in parts—and adored, at 17, the Twenty Sonnets of the Rev. Mr. Bowles (1762-1850), afterwards the opponent of Byron in the question "Was Pope a poet?" Bowles, at all events, handed the torch of non-Popeian poetry to Coleridge, who won scholarships and exhibitions that maintained him at Jesus College, Cambridge (1791). Here he met Wordsworth of St. John's, already a printed poet, at a meeting of an Essay Society. But Coleridge had not written his essay!
He now fled from Cambridge "to be a dragoon," which did not suit his genius. He returned to Cambridge: visited Oxford in 1794, met Southey of Balliol, and with him made a plan to migrate with kindred souls to the States, and found a pantisocratic society, wherein all should be brothers and equals. Coleridge was as fit to be a farming colonist as Mr. Micawber, and, being just off with one love, he presently engaged himself to another, Miss Sara Fricker, a sister of Southey's bride. Coleridge at this time wrote a good deal of verse and described his own hand as "graspless"; his genius as "sloth-jaundiced all," while, elsewhere, he spoke of his "fat vacuity of face," an eighteenth century face, with full lax lips, redeemed by dark intelligent eyes. Coleridge was
Like some bold seer in a trance
Seeing all his own mischance.
He left Cambridge without a degree, married on the prospects of his poetry; started a weekly serial, "The Watchman," and (1796) published "Poems". Some of them were written at school; many of them are full of Gray's allegorical figures, one, "Religious Musings" in blank verse, is on the Nativity and the evils of Society, others are imitative of Bowles, an "Ode to a Young Jackass," is reminiscent of Sterne's donkey. Perhaps some stanzas named "Lewti, or the Circassian Love-chaunt" alone suggest the essential qualities of Coleridge.
In 1796-1797, Coleridge took a cottage at Stowey: "The Light shall stream to a far distance from the taper in my cottage window". He was busy with an unfinished poem on Jeanne d'Arc, in blank verse (fragments appear in "The Destiny of Nations"). He represented her as seeing her Saints first when of the age of 20, to which she never attained: her eyebrows were "wildly haired". The Voices, in Coleridge, spoke to Jeanne about the Pacific Ocean, the Protoplast, Leviathan, and kindred matters, not much in her way. Jeanne has suffered as much at the hands of poets as from her French judges. Lamb induced Coleridge to abandon these absurdities.
In midsummer, 1797, Coleridge met Wordsworth and his "exquisite sister," Dorothy, who paid a visit to Stowey, and settled near him. A play, "Osorio," was not accepted for the stage: the two poets formed various projects of collaboration, one resulted in "The Ancient Mariner" (March, 1798) the quintessence of romance. In 1798 Coleridge met and carried captive Hazlitt, who later broke his bonds with a glee and fury unworthy of him. By this time, according to Hazlitt, Coleridge had made experiments in opium, of which the bondage was never broken.
In 1798 the famous volume, "Lyrical Ballads," by Coleridge and Wordsworth, challenged the world with Wordsworth's "Idiot Boy" and "Tintern Abbey," examples of the opposite poles of his genius; with "The Ancient Mariner," among other things. In 1798-1799 Coleridge was studying in Germany, absorbing philosophies: in 1800 he removed with his family to Greta Hall near Keswick, or to Windermere, while the Wordsworths were at Grasmere; hence the name of the Lake Poets.
Coleridge was now working at the second part of the never-to-be-finished "Christabel," begun at Stowey. Sir John Stoddart read or repeated some stanzas of "Christabel" to Scott, who followed the metres of Coleridge in "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" (1805). Coleridge (who did not publish "Christabel," and the extraordinary fragment composed in sleep "Kubla Khan," with "The Pains of Sleep," till 1816) was not unjustifiably annoyed by the anticipation, of his metre, which was not new, but was first used by Coleridge in romantic poetry. Scott seems to have been quite unconscious of sin.