His period in the junior school in Hertfordshire was brief, and apparently quite uneventful. Before he was ten years old "the poor friendless boy" of Elia's famous essay was "in the great city pent, mid cloisters dim," and his apprenticeship to learning in the famous foundation that has now been removed from Newgate Street to the beautiful Sussex country near Horsham lasted for nine years, in the first seven of which he seems to have seen nothing of his Devonshire home.

One would hesitate to say, despite the hardships of boarding-school life a century or more ago, that the poet would have been better off anywhere else. He recognised in later years the advantages of his training. Firmly, even brutally disciplined, his master in the upper school was Boyer, of whose severity Lamb and others have written unsparingly. Coleridge was thoroughly well grounded; he mastered the elementary rules of poetic expression, his eccentricities were repressed, his departures from law, order, and rule firmly punished. For one whose mind was ill-governed, in whom the newest idea found an immediate and devoted adherent, strong rule was the first essential of development. He passed through many phases; cobbling, medicine, and metaphysics attracted him in turn, and Boyer gladly provided an effective antidote for the virus of each. Lamb bears generous witness to his companion's budding talent, and we know that he made and kept friends, that there was something about his personality that was eminently attractive and led people to pardon in him what they would have condemned in others. A foolish escapade on the New River resulted in nearly a year's illness, and left him very weak, indeed throughout life he was never robust, but the troubles that affected his body did nothing to stunt his intellectual growth. The poet in him awoke, perhaps called to life by Mary Evans, eldest sister of a school-fellow whom he had befriended and who gratefully introduced him to his family. Mary Evans undoubtedly inspired much of his earliest, and comparatively feeble, verse. The sonnets of Bowles, who then had a following and a reputation, were another force in the making of the Coleridge we love and admire. Reading the detailed story of his life, we may note that, in the brief and simple relations with Mary Evans, Coleridge acted as though he had no definite control over his own impulses. Some of the correspondence has been preserved, and it is hard to escape the impression that while the poet was quite serious in his protestations, he exaggerated with true poetic licence the depth and permanency of his regard.

In January 1791, the Almoners of Christ's Hospital appointed Coleridge to an Exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with the idea that the school's promising pupil would pass from the University to the Church. He left Newgate Street in the September following, and entered the University a month later, intervening weeks being spent, in all probability, in Devonshire.

We find him now at the parting of the ways, the wholesome bonds of discipline relaxing, a measure of liberty before him of a kind to which he had been a stranger hitherto, and one is inclined to think that he was absolutely unfitted to stand alone or to be his own master, even within the limits imposed upon the Cambridge undergraduate. His brilliant intellect was not associated with sound common sense, the conventions and restriction of normal life were things he would not trouble about, his mind, daring and speculative, was never at rest, he stood desperately in need of some steadying influence of a kind that never came to him. The newest thought could carry him away, he cared not whither. Like many another brilliant man, Coleridge needed direction and discipline long after the time when the convention of the world seeks to enforce either. We cannot see whence the force was to come, but we must realise how greatly it was needed. Coleridge was too clever for the ranks to which he was accredited; his gifts were of the uneasy kind that can find no rest. Some men of similar temperament can settle down after a brief struggle; they bridle themselves, hide their light, bow to the world above them, and prosper. To Coleridge such a method of living would have seemed immoral, far more immoral than his own shifting, haphazard and unhappy career. He was always the slave of his own moral ideas, his weaknesses were a tribute to the sick and ailing body; to his judgment, his moral consciousness, he acted with most rigorous honesty, even to his own detriment.

When Coleridge went to Jesus College, the month was October; he became a pensioner in November, and matriculated in the following month. From 1792 he would have been in receipt of £40 per annum from his old school, and between 1792-4 he held one of the Rustat scholarships belonging to Jesus College and given only to sons of clergymen. In the year last named he became a Foundation scholar. For the first twelve months, while the recollection of Christ's Hospital discipline was perhaps still keen within him, and his friend Middleton was at Pembroke College, he worked diligently and gained his first award, the Browne Gold Medal. He competed for the Craven Scholarship, which fell to Samuel Butler, afterwards Bishop of Lichfield. By the following year Middleton had left the University and Coleridge was beginning to lose his head and find his powers. He associated himself with the most progressive and radical spirits in his College, and the authorities looked askance at him. But he paid little heed to such a trifle as the dissatisfaction of tutors. The centre of a large and admiring circle that clamoured to hear his political opinions, his latest poem, or his favourite recitation, he seemed to realise that he could hold an audience and lead opinion. Debts began to accumulate; he was indeed destined for the greater part of his life to owe more than he could pay. His suit with Mary Evans was not prospering; he tried to set himself right financially by speculating in a lottery, and, when that failed him, left Cambridge, the first of the long series of sudden departures from accustomed haunts that was to be a prominent feature in his career. A fortnight later he had become Silas Tomkyn Comberbach of the King's Light Dragoons. The new and popular recruit, who repaid his companions for doing his share of the common drudgery by writing their love-letters for them, soon found that under the most favourable conditions soldiering was not to his taste. He could not sit a horse, he could not even groom one, and it was not very long before his identity was revealed to an officer through the medium of some lines in Latin written in chalk on a wall. His elder brother, Captain James Coleridge, procured his discharge in the following April, when the Master and Fellows of Jesus readmitted him, much to the surprise of his friends. That the authorities were ready and willing to give him every chance is sufficient proof that his capacities and his personality alike pleaded powerfully in his defence.

A few months later he was on a visit to Oxford, where he met Robert Southey, his future brother-in-law, and they talked of Pantisocracy. In his Christian Life, Peter Bayne speaks of the days "when Coleridge and Southey were building, of cloud and moonbeam, their notable fabric of Pantisocracy, the government of all by all." The idea was just suited to the hare-brained poets. Twelve men, each armed with £125, were to leave England in the company of twelve women, for one of the back settlements of America, there to establish a Utopia of their own. A few hours' work a day from each would suffice, they thought, for the needs of all. Political and religious opinions were to be free, and the question of the validity of the marriage contract was left open. Needless perhaps to add that neither the industrious Southey nor his erratic friend had £125, but the former hoped to raise the amount from the sale of Joan of Arc and other of his early work, while Coleridge proposed to publish by subscription a volume of Imitations from the Modern Latin Poets. Like so many of the volumes he intended to write, this one was never written, though he had all the scholarship necessary to bring a venture of the kind to a successful issue. Southey and Coleridge met a little later in Bristol and went into Somersetshire, where they were joined by Burnett and Thomas Poole. Of these two men the latter was to play an important part in the life-story of Coleridge.

A little later the young poet had recovered sufficiently from his overmastering attachment to Mary Evans to become engaged to Sarah Fricker, Southey's sister-in-law. He collaborated with the future laureate in a rapidly written dramatic poem, The Fall of Robespierre, which he dedicated to Mr. Martin of Jesus College, without any reference to Southey's considerable part in it. The enthusiasm for Pantisocracy was short-lived; in a few months its originators had dropped the scheme, though it was to be revived later. Coleridge went back to Cambridge, and left suddenly in the December of 1794 without taking his degree. The reasons for this step have never been revealed; some think that he left on account of debt, others think the cause must have been some further breach of discipline. His career at Jesus had been brief and unsatisfactory, and he was soon dropped by the College authorities and the Committee of Christ's Hospital. Whatever their private views of his ability, they could no longer remain indifferent to his irregular life, his inability to settle down and work, the dangerous results of too much tolerance in an institution that must control its scholars or cease to exist. On the other hand, Coleridge could not respond to order and discipline. He was not like other men; of him it might be truly said in the words of the Patriarch, "unstable as water, thou shalt not excel." The period of wandering trouble and unrest had begun; it was to continue until, the greater part of his life and life's-work accomplished, he found a hospitable asylum at Highgate. It cannot be supposed that Cambridge was in any degree responsible for what happened within the walls of Jesus College or in the world beyond. The erratic disposition was with Coleridge as a little boy. Christ's Hospital subdued but did not eradicate it, Jesus College gave it an atmosphere of limited freedom in which to blossom and bud until the college boundaries were no longer wide enough to contain such an errant spirit.

CHAPTER II
IN SEARCH OF THE IDEAL

When Coleridge left the University he had entered his twenty-third year; he had rather more than forty before him, but, as the two preceding years had been, so were the most of those that followed. Trouble, largely if not altogether of his own making, anxiety, comparative poverty, ill-health, these were the shadows that darkened his days. For him life was a problem with which he could not grapple; although he had a giant's strength he did not know how to use it. He was master of a rare and exquisite gift, but it did not avail him. Other men, with a tithe of his talent and the full capacity for living a well-ordered life, could earn a comfortable competence, acquire honour and command respect, while Coleridge, who was in so many respects their master, drifted across the wide waters of life, a ship without a rudder. We need not criticise, we can better pity a man who, greatly gifted, could not raise his head among his contemporaries. Had some stern disciplinarian stood behind him at Cambridge he might have achieved distinction; had he married a strong resolute woman she might have taught him regular industry and self-respect. But in all the important actions of his life the mood of the moment was the deciding factor, so that, despite the number of his friends, there was none to help. Coleridge was almost a genius, and quite a law to himself. Such happiness as came to him was found chiefly in intercourse with kindred spirits, in grappling with metaphysical problems, in refuting the current errors of philosophy, and above all in the kindness and generosity of friends. Woe to the man who accepts help from others! Once he has done this he stands for ever on a lower plane, his life is no longer his own, he can no longer say, "I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul." It was the misfortune of Coleridge to receive assistance in those critical hours when a man must stand alone, though it be but in a garret with no more food and clothing than will serve for the necessities of life. There are few brilliant exceptions to the sweeping rule that forbids self-respecting men to receive doles. Horace and Virgil are notable among them, but the rule stands, even while we remember that both Martial and Juvenal declared that the protection of prince or patron offers the only chance to poetry. With Coleridge there was less excuse than the poet may claim, for he could always command a living wage in journalism. The trouble with him was not to get money for his work, but to give work in return for other people's money.