vate in the student a high poetic standard. Yet Cole ridge at his best could be comprehended within the limits of a very thin volume. If it should be desired to extend the study of Coleridge beyond the "Ancient Mariner," the finest of his other poems might be brought before the class by recitations or readings. Such poems are "Christabel," "Genevieve," "Kubla Khan," "Ballad of the Dark Ladie," "France," "Fears in Solitude," "The Eolian Harp," "Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement," "The Foster Mother's Tale," "Sonnet to Burke," "Answer to a Child's Question," 'Hymn before Sunrise," "The Lime Tree Bower My Prison," "The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem," "Frost at Midnight," "Dejection," "Ode to Tranquillity," "Lines to W. L.," "The Pains of Sleep," "The Knight's Tomb," "Youth and Age," "Fancy in Nubibus," the bird song in "Zapolya," the Miserere in "Remorse," and the famous original passage upon "The fair humanities of old religion" in "The Picco lomini."

66

KATHARINE LEE BATES.

WELLESLEY COLLEGE,
May, 1889.

COLERIDGE.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

(1772-1834.)

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, born in Devonshire, Eng land, Oct. 21, 1772, was the youngest of thirteen children. His father was a clergyman, schoolmaster, and bookworm, holding the two positions of vicar of Ottery St. Mary and master of Henry VIII.'s Free Grammar School in the same parish. Coleridge has recorded of his mother that she was, as doubtless she had need to be, "an admirable economist." His childish love, however, seems to have gone out less to her, the Martha "careful and troubled about many things," than to the absent-minded, unworldly old vicar, who is remembered for his "Critical Latin Grammar," wherein he proposed a change in the names of the cases, designating the ablative, for example, as "the quare-quale-quidditive case;" and also for the Hebrew quotations, which, copiously besprinkled throughout his sermons, he used to recommend to the awestricken hearts of his rustic congregation, as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost." "The truth is," says Coleridge, "my father was not a first-rate genius; he was, however, a first-rate Christian, which is much better."

In this crowded vicarage the little poet led, as he tells us, a solitary life. "I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Jack the Giant-killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall and mope, and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood; and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass . . I never played except by myself, and then only acted over what I had been reading or fancying, or half one, half the other; with a stick cutting aown weeds and nettles, as one of the 'Seven champions of Christendom.' Alas! I had all the simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the child's habits. I never thought as a child, never had the language of a child."

Before the boy was nine years old, occurred the sud den death of his father. Money, never abundant in this household, was now scarcer than ever, and the dreamy, precocious child must needs be abruptly pushed out of the home shelter into the rough life of a London Charity School. Through the exertions of one of his father's old pupils, an eminent judge of the neighborhood, Coleridge obtained admission to Christ's Hospital and was made a Blue-Coat Boy. Here among the Blue-Coats he passed the next eight years of his life, still lonely, for all his six hundred schoolfellows, and rapt in strange imaginings. "My talents and superiority," he says, "made me forever at the head in my routine of study,

though utterly without the desire to be so; without a spark of ambition; and as to emulation, it had no meaning for me; but the difference between me and my formfellows, in our lessons and exercises, bore no proportion to the measureless difference between me and them in the wide, wild wilderness of useless, unarranged book knowledge and book thoughts." It is related that the visionary student, who seems to have been addicted to at least one boyish pastime, delighting on summer holidays in the bathing excursions to a neighboring stream, was once walking down the Strand, throwing out his arms continually, as if in the act of swimming. A stranger, with whose person his hand came in contact, taking the lad for a pickpocket, seized him, with the exclamation: "What, so young and so wicked!". "I am not a pickpocket," pleaded Coleridge, "I only thought I was Leander swimming the Hellespont." The astonished stranger, finding his thief turn genius, procured for him, by way of apology, free access to a circulating library.

"Here," writes Coleridge, "I read through the catalogue, folios and all, whether I understood them, or did not understand them, running all risks in skulking out to get the two volumes which I was entitled to have daily. Conceive what I must have been at fourteen; I was in a continual low fever. My whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner, and read, read, read fancying myself on Robinson Crusoe's island, finding a mountain of plum-cake, and making a room for myself, and then eating it into the shapes of tables

and chairs-hunger and fancy!"

Poor little Blue Coat! Those feasts of books were the only feasts he knew in Christ's Hospital. It required a flight of fancy indeed for the half-starved orphan to imagine a plumcake. For at that time, in the words which Coleridge himself used years after: "The portion of food to the Blue-Coats was cruelly insufficient for those who had no friends to supply them." Lamb, his schoolfellow, then and always Coleridge's "gentle-hearted Charles,” had relatives in town, and so fared better; but the whimsical essayist has given, in the sketch entitled "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," a sympathetic picture of his less fortunate friend's experience.

Yet Coleridge's recollections of his school days were not all unhappy. To an eager intellect like his, the field of knowledge was itself delectable land. Under the guidance of this same choleric head master, the "rabid pedant" at whom Lamb pokes such irresist ible fun, Coleridge ranged widely over Greek, Latin, and English literature. "At school (Christ's Hospital)," he says, in his Biographia Literaria, "I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero; of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil; and again of Virgil to Ovid. ... At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakspeare and Milton as lessons; and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to