CONTENTS PAGE THE LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES BRIEF SURVEY OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY POETRY TABULAR STATEMENT OF THE TENDENCIES. BALLAD POETRY, A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, born at Ottery St. Mary, October 21, 1772; died at Highgate, July 25, 1834. Childhood and youth. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, on the 21st of October, 1772. His father, the Rev. John Coleridge, the vicar and schoolmaster of the place, had conquered his small position in the world. by dint of hard and faithful work. He had been twice married, and the poet was the youngest of a family of thirteen children. The only characteristic trait which Coleridge can be said to have inherited from his father was a certain intellectual pedantry, which manifested itself in later years by the outlandish titles which he assigned to works not destined to advance in many instances beyond the title-page.* So we find in the worthy vicar's Critical Latin Grammar a proposed change in the nomenclature of the cases, whereby the ablative was to receive the expressive name of the quippequare-quale-quia-quidditive case. It is also told of him that he was wont to harangue his simple congregation in the original Hebrew, as being the "immediate language of the Holy Ghost." They considered his successor as wanting in piety for abandoning this practice. *For example, "Consolations and Comforts from the exercise and right application of the Reason, the Imagination, and the Moral Feelings, addressed especially to those in Sickness, Adversity, or Distress of Mind, from Speculative Gloom, etc." The poet's mother, Anne Bowdon, was a practical-minded woman, of no marked ability of any kind, but thoroughly determined that all her sons should receive the education of gentlemen. The father had frequently announced his intention of apprenticing them to various trades; so Mrs. Coleridge perhaps conferred upon the world a poet, and saved it from an incompetent blacksmith. Our knowledge of Coleridge's childhood is derived entirely from his autobiographical letters to Thomas Poole, written in 1797.* That he was unlike other boys need scarcely be said. From his earliest years he was an omnivorous reader, and led captive by an imagination which seized upon and magnified whatever he read. "My father's sister kept an everything shop at Crediton, and there I read through all the gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, etc. And I used to lie by the wall and mope, and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly; and in a flood of them I was accustomed to race up and down the churchyard, and act over all I had been reading, on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass," cutting them down, as he elsewhere says, "like one of the Seven Champions of Christendom." "So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful and inordinately passionate, and as I could not play at anything and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys; and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the *Poems referring to his boyhood are the following: Sonnet to the River Otter; Lines to a Beautiful Spring in a Village; Frost at Midnight; Lines Composed in a Concert Room, and other stray verses. |