Coleridges Ancient Mariner and Select Poems | Page 3

in the
curriculum,--Latin and Greek poetry and philosophy, mediaeval science and
metaphysics--and won the approval of his teachers by the excellence of his verses in
Greek and Latin, such as boys at school and students at the universities were expected to
write in those days. In the great city school, as in the Devonshire vicarage, he lived in the
imagination, inert of body and rapacious of intellect; but he was solitary no longer,
having found his tongue and among his more intellectual schoolfellows an interested
audience. While yet a boy, he would hold an audience spellbound by his eloquent
declamation or the fervor of his argument till, as Lamb, who was one of his hearers, tells
us, "the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!"
That is the way his conversation,--or monologue, as it often was,--affected not boys only,
but men, and especially young men, to his dying day. He cast a spell upon men by his
speech; upon his schoolfellows, upon young men at the universities in the Pantisocracy
days, upon Lloyd and Poole at Nether Stowey, upon earnest young thinkers in his last
days at Highgate; so that even if he had never written "The Ancient Mariner" and the
Biographia, Literaria he would still be remembered for the inspiration of his talk.
Further details of the life at Christ's Hospital must be sought in Lamb's two essays,
especially that on "Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago." In 1791, having
secured a Christ's Hospital "exhibition," he entered Jesus College, Cambridge.
His university life extended over three years, from October, 1791, to December, 1794. It
was an unhappy time for him and an uneasy time for his respectable relatives, for reasons
that were partly in his own nature and partly in the temper of the times.
Even Boyer's severe training, while it had made him a hard student and an unusual
scholar for his years, had failed to give him what he most needed as a balance to his
intellect and imagination, stability of character. There is evidence that after the first few
months, during which the habits of his hard school life had not yet broken, the new
liberty of university life led him into extravagance, if not dissipation. Work he doubtless
did (he won the Browne medal for a Greek ode on the slave-trade in 1792), but fitfully,
giving less and less attention to his regular studies and more to conviviality and, above all,
to dreams of literary fame. He wrote verses after various models, sentimental, fanciful, or
gallant; he was enthusiastic in praise of a contemporary sonneteer, the Rev. William
Bowles, whose "divine sensibility" seemed to him the height of poetic feeling; and in
connection with Wordsworth's younger brother Christopher, who entered Cambridge in
1793, he formed a literary society that discussed, among other things, Wordsworth's
volume of early poetry, "Descriptive Sketches," published in that year. Wordsworth
himself was a Cambridge man, but had taken his degree in 1791 and gone abroad, so that

the two men whose personal friendship was to mean so much in English poetry did not
meet until 1796. Already in 1793, however, Coleridge had developed political theories, or
rather sympathies, which were preparing him for fellowship with Wordsworth.
The French Revolution, which, after years of preparation, took concrete shape in 1789,
did not look to young Englishmen in 1791-4 as it looks to us now, nor even as it was to
look to those same Englishmen in 1800. In those first years warm-hearted young
enthusiasts at the universities saw in the violence of their fellow-men across the Channel
only the struggles of the beautiful Spirit of Liberty bursting the chains of age-long
tyranny and corruption and calling men up to the heights to breathe diviner air.
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!"
wrote Wordsworth afterwards; and in the glow of his young idealism he had gone over to
France in the autumn of 1791 and was on the point of throwing in his lot with the
revolutionists, when his parents compelled his return by cutting off his supplies. And
many who, like Coleridge, merely watched from afar shared his faith that a new order of
things was to be established, wherein Love should be Law and man's inhumanity to man
become but a memory of things outworn.
Less generous men, with a selfish interest in established privileges; timid men, who
looked with terror upon any prospect of change; older and wiser men, who better
understood the foundations of social order and the nature of man--all these looked with
distrust upon the revolutionary idealism that was spreading from France through the
younger generation of Englishmen. The new notions of liberty, it was felt, threatened not
only the vested