GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
Wordsworth suggesting the shooting of the albatross as the central 
thought and turning-point of the wonderful story. They emulated, 
criticized, and inspired each other, taking each his individual line, 
his own view of the powers and province of poetry. From this 
time forth Coleridge was to concern himself with the supernatural 
and the mystical, Wordsworth to be the exponent of the wonder 
and the beauty underlying even common things in life and nature. 
The subsequent events of Coleridge’s life are well known. 
Having to support a growing family, he began to lecture on religion 
and politics at Bristol, and there he published his first. volume of 
poems in 1796. To start a periodical called The Watchman, that 
only survived two months, he toured the country, canvassing for 
subscribers. He preached in several Unitarian pulpits, and was 
about, half-heartedly, to enter the Unitarian ministry, when the 
brothers Wedgwood (foreseeing the loss to the world of a poetical 
genius), by a beneficent arrangement, stepped in and rendered 
the sacrifice unnecessary. In 1798 he travelled in Germany with 
the Wordsworths; there, in the Hartz Mountains, though ill- 
dressed and slovenly, he was the very life of the party, rhyming 
and poetizing, singing and joking, and “ discoursing in eloquent 
monologue, as was his wont, on every subject from the captivity 
of nations to the Millennium.”’ He then left his friends, and spent 
eight or nine months in Germany, making himself master of the 
language, attending lectures, and, in a period of great intellectual 
activity and excitement, accepting for the time being many of 
the dogmas and theories held by German philosophers and thinkers. 
In 1800 he left London and settled in the Lake district, sharing 
Greta Hall with Southey. A cold that he caught on the occasion 
of a tour in Scotland with the Wordsworths, resulted, on his return, 
in a long and severe illness, during which, to assuage pain, he first 
fell into the terrible opium habit that wrecked his after life. 
Cursing his weakness, and fleeing, as it were, from himself, he now 
again went abroad. For nearly a year he acted as secretary to 
the Governor of Malta; he stayed seven or eight months in Italy, 
and during the whole of that period he never communicated with 
his family at the Lakes. Back in England again, he was offered 
shares in two newspapers, and could have made two thousand a 
year; but he refused, declaring that he wouldn’t give up the 
country and the leisurely reading of old folios for “‘ two thousand 
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