the son of a clergyman. He studied at Cambridge and then went to London,
where he enlisted as a trooper in a regiment of dragoons. Finding military
service uncongenial, he obtained a discharge and devoted himself to
literature. Together with Southey and Lovell he undertook to found a
communistic colony on the banks of the Susquehanna in America. The project
failed from lack of money. The three friends married the three sisters
Fireckes of Bristol and settled in Stowey. There Coleridge, Southey and
Wordsworth founded their so-called "Lake School of Poetry." Coleridge has
told in his "Biographia Literaria," how the "Lyrical Ballads," issued at
that time, derived their inspiration from two sources; to wit, supernatural
themes, which appealed to Coleridge, and homely every-day subjects, which
Wordsworth loved to beautify. Occasionally Coleridge tried himself in the
other field, as in his "Lines to a Young Ass." In the same year Coleridge
brought out the famous "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," his "Odes," and wrote
his first version of "Christabel." The period at Nether Stowey, from 1797
to 1798, was Coleridge's most fruitful year as a poet. All his best poetic
works had their origin at that time. Swinburne has said of Coleridge: "For
height and perfection of imaginative quality he is the greatest of lyric
poets, this was his special power and is his special praise." Much of the
charm and magnetic suggestion of his famous poem "Christabel" rests on its
exquisite vowel-music. The same is true of his wonderful "Rime of the
Ancient Mariner." There the running prose glossary accompanying the poem
displays the same delicate, fanciful tone as his most musical verse. By
these two poems alone Coleridge proved himself the most successful of the
English poets who have tried to imbue their verse with an eerie sense of
the invisible and the unreal:

Like one that on a lonesome road,
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And, having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend,
Doth close behind him tread.

[Sidenote: "Aids to Reflection"]

[Sidenote: "Sartor Resartus"]

After his twenty-fifth year, Coleridge's poetic qualities declined. As a
result of his travels in Germany he published, in 1800, a translation of
Schiller's "Wallenstein," after which he reluctantly undertook to edit the
"Morning Post," a government organ. In 1804 he went to Malta as secretary
of Governor Ball. His l