ry," a collection of folk-ballads and
rude verse-romances such as the common people cherished but critics had
long refused to consider as poetry, was published in 1765. These two
books were of prime importance in fostering a new taste in
literature,--a love of natural beauty, of simplicity, and of rude
strength. The new taste hailed with delight the appearance of a native
lyric genius in Burns, whose first volume of poems was printed in 1786.
It welcomed also the homely, simple sweetness, what Coleridge and Lamb
called the "divine chit-chat," of Cowper, whose "Task" appeared in the
preceding year. But it was in Coleridge himself and his close
contemporaries and followers that the splendor of the new poetry showed
itself. He was two years younger than Wordsworth, a year younger than
Scott; he was sixteen at the birth of Byron, twenty at that of Shelley,
twenty-four at that of Keats; and he outlived all of them except
Wordsworth. His genius blossomed early. "The Ancient Mariner," his
greatest poem, was published some years before Wordsworth's "Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality" was written, or Scott's "Lay of the Last
Minstrel." He was in the prime of life, or what should have been the
prime of life--forty years old--when Byron burst into sudden fame with
the first two cantos of "Childe Harold" in 1812; he was forty-six when
Keats published "Endymion"; he was fifty-one when Shelley was drowned.
And of all this gifted company Coleridge, though not the strongest
character or the most prolific poet, was the profoundest intellect and
the _most originative poetic spirit_.

There was little hint, however, of future greatness or of fellowship
with great names in his birth and early circumstances. His father was a
country clergyman and schoolmaster in the village of Ottery St. Mary, in
Devonshire, a simple-hearted unworldly man, full of curious learning and
not very attentive to practical affairs. His mother managed the
household and brought up the children. Both his parents were of simple
West-country stock; but his father, having a natural turn for study and
having done well in his early manhood as a schoolmaster, went at the age
of thirty-one as a sizar, or poor student, to Sidney-Sussex College,
Cambridge, took orders, and was afterwards given the living of Ottery
St. Mary. Here he continued his beloved work of teaching, in addition to
his pastoral duties, and by means of this combination won the humble
livelihood which,