343 



London IM KeM\ick, ti Penrith, to Coleorton, to 

 "1, ami to liridgwatvr. At l.uinlciii he ln-^an 

 what might have leen a very remarkable series of 

 Jeet urea at the Royal IiiHtitution ; hut the experi- 

 ment failed, for the Maine cause as previous ones 

 liml failed. He next thought of a fresh veiituie in 

 .journalism, and projected a new weekly pa|>er, The 

 l-'i-n nd, for which 1m got a nmnlxjr of sulwcrilMjrs. 

 It was printed at IVuritli at hi* own expense. The 

 Wordsworth.-? took him into their house at Allan 



Hank, ( Iras re, for the winter ; and while Coleridge 



wrote iiiuM uf tin- papers for The /V/VW himself, 

 Wordsworth supplied him with some of the articles, 

 and Sarah Ilutchinson transcril>ed them week ly 

 week for the press. The paper lived from August 

 Isn'.i to March ISK). The hahit of opium-eating, 

 which had now obtained a fatal ascendency, could 

 not lie hidden from his friends; and at this junc- 

 ture the Wonlsworths, with the greatest delicacy, 

 tried their utmost to help and to befriend him. 

 They were misunderstood. He went up to London 

 in 1810, and a strange cloud (the full story of which 

 has vet to he told ) obscured for a time the old 

 relationship between the households. A partial 

 estrangement lasted for some years, but was at 

 length overcome by the friendly offices of Henry 

 Crabb Robinson. 



During Coleridge's later years in London he 

 lived for four years with an old Bristol friend, 

 -John Morgan, at Hammersmith. He first tried the 

 experiment of lecturing on Shakespeare. Occa- 

 sionally his appearances were brilliant ; more 

 usually they were absolute failures. His conversa- 

 tional powers, however, seem to have increased, 

 while his success as a lecturer diminished. All his 

 life he hail been in the habit of receiving gifts freely 

 from such friends as the Beaumonts, and the 

 Wedgwoods, from Stuart, and Wordsworth, and 

 De Quincev ; and though he occasionally did 

 generous things to others, his neglect of the primal 

 duties to his own family put a severe strain upon 

 the tie that bound these friends to him. 



The remaining years of his life were spent at 

 Highgate with Mr and Mrs Gillman, whose kind- 

 ness and consideration were unbounded. Though a 

 wreck of his former self, the baleful opium-habit 

 lessened, as Coleridge grew older, and he was able 

 to do a good deal of miscellaneous writing. Some 

 of his best prose work was written at Highgate. 

 Though a dreamy and often unintelligible sage, he 

 became a sort of oracle to a circle 01 enthusiastic 

 -admirers that gathered round him, and he com- 

 pletely fascinated the young men, who made their 

 weekly pilgrimages to Gillman's house to hear him 

 talk. As the years went on, his health somewhat 

 improved, and he was even able to make occasional 

 vi.-its. In 1829 he took a short tour with the 

 Wordsworths, accompanying the poet and his 

 daughter to the Rhine, lie died on the 23d July 

 1834, and was buried at Highgate. 



A> a Poet, Critic, and Philosopher (the three 

 functions having been combined by Coleridge as 

 they hat! never been by any previous Englishman) 

 he was certainly a star of the first magnitude in 

 the firmament of letters. For originality, insight, 

 grace, musical ness, deft subtlety of thought, natural 

 ne.-s and charm of diction, he had only one rival 

 amongst the poets of the Renaissance. It is true 

 there have lieen greater poets in England, but there 

 has been no greater poetical critic in British litera- 

 i ure. < 'oleridge was a critic of poets (and the poets 

 have, as a rule, been the best critics of each other ). 

 A- yet there is no estimate of the literary revival 

 which Coleridge and Wordsworth inaugurated 

 that is superior to what the former wrote in his 

 l'<li-ii/>lii<i I.iti rnria ; and he was a philosophical 

 critic, because he was a philosopher amongst the 

 pcets. He may be said to have inaugurated a new 



era by his poetic idealism, and by introducing the 

 spirit of Plato alike into his poetry and his literary 

 criticism. As a philosopher, however, lie doe* not 

 occupy the foremost place. He was too miscel- 

 laneous, too assimilative, and his int ll<< t too 

 meteoric and vagrant for speculative originality of 

 tin- highest order, lint he was one ol the most 

 suggestive of critics. Though not profoundly 

 leai ned. he was very widely read ; and he did more to 

 leaven English philosophy, literature, and theology 

 with the depth and the free spirit of Germany. 

 than any one of his contemporaries. He vitalised 

 whatever he discussed ; and his writings will prob- 

 ably continue to kindle successive generations, and 

 to fascinate them, even while they fail to convince. 



Coleridge's most important works are: Poems (1876) ; 

 Wallenttein (1800); T/te Friend (1809-10); Remorse 

 (1813); Christabel, Kubla Khan, <L-c. (181C); The States- 

 man's Manual (1816); Sibylline Leaves (1817); Bio- 

 graphia Literarin (1817); Aids to Reflection (18'J6). 

 Posthumously published four volumes of Literary 

 Remains ( 1836-38 ) ; Confusions of an Enquiring Spirit 

 ( 1840) ; Essay on Method ( 1845). 



The chief authorities in reference to Coleridge are 

 Letters, Conversations, and Recollections, by Allsop ( 1836 ) ; 

 Cottle's Early Recollections (1837); Gillnian's Life 

 ( 1838 ) ; Coleridge's Letters to Sir George and Lady 

 Beaumont (1886) ; Mrs Sandford's Thomas Poole and hit 

 Friends (1889); the Buxjraphia Literaria (1817); De 

 Quincey's ' S. T. Coleridge,' in his Recollections of the Lakes 

 ( 1857 ) ; Eliza Meteyard's Group of Enylislimen, 1795-1815 

 ( 1871 ) ; the Memoirs of Wordsworth ( 1851 ) ; ^outhey's 

 Life and Correspondence ( 1850 ) ; Lamb's Letters ( 1888 ) ; 

 Mr Traill's Coleridye (1884); Brandl's S. T. Coleridge 

 and the Ewilish Romantic School ( 1882 ) ; the short lives 

 by Traill ( 1884 ) and Hall Caine ( 1887 ) ; the life by Dykes 

 Campbell, prefixed to his admirable edition of the works 

 ( 1893 ; separately published 1894 ) ; and the Letters edited 

 by Ernest Coleridge (1895). 



Coleridge, SARA, the gifted daughter of the 

 great Coleridge, was born, 23d* December 1802, at 

 Greta Hall, near Keswick, where she was brought up 

 hySouthey. Her 'depth of meditative eye' is noticed 

 by Wordsworth in the finest lines of his rather poor 

 poem, the Triad (1828), the other maidens of the 

 group being Edith Southey and Dora Wordsworth. 

 Sara early showed remarkable powers of mind, 

 with all her father's leaning towards psychology 

 and abstract thought. At twenty she published, 

 to aid her brother Derwent's college exj>enses, a 

 translation of Martin Dobrizhofer's Latin Account of 

 the Abipones ( 1784), and three years later the ' Loyal 

 Servitor's' memoirs of the Chevalier Bayard. In 

 1829 she married her cousin, Henry Nelson Cole- 

 ridge, and on his death in 1843 succeeded him in 

 the task of annotating and editing her father's 

 writings. Her health failed early, and she died 

 3d May 1852. Her own works were Pretty L> 

 for Good Children (1834), and Plnintmtinion (1837), 

 a somewhat remarkable fairy-tale. Her Memoirs 

 and Letters were edited by her daughter in 1873. 

 Her son, HERBERT COLERIDGE, born in 1830, was 

 educated at Eton and Balliol College, took a double- 

 first in 1852, and was called to the bar, but devoted 

 himself to the study of comparative philology. 

 Elected a member o'f the Philological Society in 

 isr>7, he threw himself with enthusiasm into its 

 ambitious project of a standard English dictionary, 

 and was practically editor in its earlier stages. 

 His own works were a Glossarial I ndes to the 

 Printetl KtHjlish Literature of the Thirteenth 



( I860), and an excellent e>say on King Arthur, 



nrii , a ece >s , 



printed after his untimely death (at London, 23d 

 April 1861) by the Philological Society. 



Coleroon, the largest and most northerly 

 lnaneh from the Kaveri, flows 94 miles, chiefly 

 letween Triehinopoly and Tanjore, into the Bay of 

 Bengal. It is remarkable for its two weirs or 

 dams, the niiicuts, constructed in 1856. 



