George D. Boyle, Hugh Chisholm and John M. Robertson

“ A new period in Coleridge’s life now began. He soon left the Wordsworths to spend four months at Ratzeburg, whence he removed to Göttingen to attend lectures. A great intellectual movement had begun in Germany. Coleridge was soon in the full whirl of excitement. He learnt much from Blumenbach and Eichhorn, and took interest in all that was going on around him. During his stay of nine months in Germany, he made himself master of the language to such purpose that the translation of Wallenstein—his first piece of literary work after his return to England—was actually accomplished in six weeks. ”

“ Wordsworth was to show the real poetry that lies hidden in commonplace subjects, while Coleridge was to treat supernatural subjects to illustrate the common emotions of humanity. From this sprang the Lyrical Ballads, to which Coleridge contributed The Ancient Mariner, the Nightingale and two scenes from Osorio, and after much cogitation the book was published in 1798 at Bristol by Cottle, to whose reminiscences, often indulging too much in detail, we owe the account of this remarkable time. ”

“ When, again, he met Wordsworth in 1797, the two poets freely and sympathetically discussed Spinoza, for whom Coleridge always retained a deep admiration; and when in 1798 he gave up his Unitarian preaching, he named his second child Berkeley, signifying a new allegiance, but still without accepting Christian rites otherwise than passively. Shortly afterwards he went to Germany, where he began to study Kant, and was much captivated by Lessing. In the Biographia he avows that the writings of Kant “more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding” ”

“ The whole soul of the poet is reflected in the Ode to Dejection. The well-known lines—
with the passage which follows, contain more vividly, perhaps, than anything which Coleridge has written, the expression of the shaping and colouring function which he assigns, in the Biographia Literaria, to imagination. Christabel and the Ancient Mariner have so completely taken possession of the highest place, that it is needless to do more than allude to them. ”

“ The poet was the youngest child of his second wife, Anne Bowdon (d. 1809) , a woman of great good sense, and anxiously ambitious for the success of her sons. On the death of his father, a presentation to Christ’s Hospital was procured for Coleridge by the judge, Sir Francis Buller, an old pupil of his father’s. He had already begun to give evidence of a powerful imagination, and he has described in a letter to his valued friend, Tom Poole, the pernicious effect which the admiration of an uncle and his circle of friends had upon him at this period. ”

“ Inasmuch as he finally followed in philosophy the mainly poetical or theosophic movement of Schelling, which satisfied neither the logical needs appealed to by Hegel nor the new demand for naturalistic induction, Coleridge, after arousing a great amount of philosophic interest in his own country in the second quarter of the century, has ceased to “make a school.” ”

“ One of the officers of the dragoon regiment, finding a Latin sentence inscribed on a wall, discovered the condition of the very awkward recruit. Shortly afterwards an old school-fellow (G. L. Tuckett) heard of his whereabouts, and by the intervention of his brother, Captain James Coleridge, his discharge was procured. He returned for a short time to Cambridge, but quitted the university without a degree in 1794. In the same year he visited Oxford, and after a short tour in Wales went to Bristol, where he met Southey. The French Revolution had stirred the mind of Southey to its depths. ”

“ From that position he gradually moved towards pantheism, a way of thought to which he had shown remarkable leanings when, as a schoolboy, he discoursed of Neo-Platonism to Charles Lamb, or—if we may trust his recollection—translated the hymns of Synesius. ”