, during
which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new
liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not
dissipation. Work he doubtless did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek
ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully, giving less and less
attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above
all, to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models,
sentimental, fanciful, or gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a
contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William Bowles, whose "divine
sensibility" seemed to him the height of poetic feeling; and in
connection with Wordsworth's younger brother Christopher, who entered
Cambridge in 1793, he formed a literary society that discussed, among
other things, Wordsworth's volume of early poetry, "Descriptive
Sketches," published in that year. Wordsworth himself was a Cambridge
man, but had taken his degree in 1791 and gone abroad, so that the two
men whose personal friendship was to mean so much in English poetry did
not meet until 1796. Already in 1793, however, Coleridge had developed
political theories, or rather sympathies, which were preparing him for
fellowship with Wordsworth.

The French Revolution, which, after years of preparation, took concrete
shape in 1789, did not look to young Englishmen in 1791-4 as it looks to
us now, nor even as it was to look to those same Englishmen in 1800. In
those first years warm-hearted young enthusiasts at the universities saw
in the violence of their fellow-men across the Channel only the
struggles of the beautiful Spirit of Liberty bursting the chains of
age-long tyranny and corruption and calling men up to the heights to
breathe diviner air.

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!"

wrote Wordsworth afterwards; and in the glow of his young idealism he
had gone over to France in the autumn of 1791 and was on the point of
throwing in his lot with the revolutionists, when his parents compelled
his return by cutting off his supplies. And many who, like Coleridge,
merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of things was
to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to
man become but a memory of things outworn.

Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges;
timid men, who looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and
wiser men, who better understood the foundations o