emes that took him away from Cambridge for good and all. In June,
1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met
Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them
out of which, before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of
Pantisocracy. A company of gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to
America, take up lands in the Susquehanna valley, and there establish an
ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and find happiness
in a life of justice, labor, and love. The education of the young in the
principles of ideal humanity was an important part of the scheme. We are
reminded of the Brook Farm experiment in New England a generation later,
which bears a daughter's likeness to Pantisocracy, the chief difference
being that the New England enthusiasts were mature men and women and
really put the idea into practice, whereas the Pantisocrats were for the
most part collegians and never got beyond the stage of talking and
writing about their plans. The scheme was further elaborated at Bristol,
where Coleridge, returning from a vacation tour in Wales, again met
Southey, and at Bath, the home of Southey and of Southey's betrothed and
her sister, Edith and Sarah Fricker--"two sisters, milliners of Bath,"
as Byron contemptuously called them.

To the other sister, Sarah, Coleridge rather precipitately engaged
himself. His love for Mary Evans was not dead, but he seems to have
despaired of winning her and to have determined, by uniting himself
domestically with Southey and his friends, to make retreat from their
communistic scheme impossible. A few weeks later he is back at
Cambridge, tortured apparently between his old love and his new
engagement. Mary Evans has written to him deploring his wild notions and
the mad plan of Pantisocracy, yet confident that he has "too much
sensibility to be an infidel." Southey has reproved him rather sharply
for failing to write to his betrothed at Bath. Our next glimpse of him
is at London, discussing poetry and philosophy with Lamb at the
"Salutation and Cat" tavern and perhaps trying to get a sight of Mary
Evans. In December he is again at Bristol, in lively correspondence with
Southey about democracy, Pantisocracy, and poetry, but at the same time
he addresses a last appeal to Miss Evans. Her answer is kind, but final;
that chapter is closed, and Coleridge writes to Southey that he will "do
his duty," by which he means apparently that