either non-existent or constantly at fault. His
verse was so little facile, it paid so little regard to any of the
common allurements of narrative-interest or varied subject, it was so
necessary for it to reach the full white heat, the absolute instant of
poetic projection, that when it was not very good it was apt to be
scarcely tolerable. It is nearly impossible to be duller than Wordsworth
at his dullest, and unluckily it is as impossible to find a poet of
anything like his powers who has given himself the license to be dull so
often and at such length. The famous "Would he had blotted a thousand"
applies to him with as much justice as it was unjust in its original
application; and it is sometimes for pages together a positive struggle
to remember that one is reading one of the greatest of English poets,
and a poet whose influence in making other poets has been second hardly
to that of Spenser, of Keats, or of the friend who follows him in our
survey.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, at Ottery St. Mary, of
which place his father was vicar, on the 21st October 1772. The family
was merely respectable before his day, but since it has been of very
unusual distinction, intellectual and other. He went to Christ's
Hospital when he was not quite ten years old, and in 1791 was admitted
to an exhibition at Jesus College, Cambridge, with his thoughts already
directed to poetry by the sonnets of Bowles above mentioned, and with a
reputation, exaggerated perhaps, but certainly not invented, in Lamb's
famous "Elia" paper on his old school. Indeed, high as is Coleridge's
literary position on the strength of his writing alone, his talk and its
influence on hearers have been unanimously set higher still. He did very
well at first, gaining the Browne Medal for Greek Verse and
distinguishing himself for the Craven Scholarship; but he speedily fell
in love, in debt, it is suspected in drink, and it is known into various
political and theological heresies. He left Cambridge and enlisted at
Reading in the 15th Light Dragoons. He obtained his discharge, however,
in three or four months, and no notice except a formal admonition
appears to have been taken of his resuming his position at Cambridge.
Indeed he was shortly after elected to a Foundation Scholarship. But in
the summer of 1794 he visited Oxford, and after he had fallen in with
Southey, whose views were already Jacobinical, the pair engaged
themselves to Pantisocracy