Coleridges Ancient Mariner and Select Poems | Page 4

rights of property and the prescriptions of rank, but the Church, too, and
religion. Some of the would-be reformers were avowed atheists; some (Coleridge and his
friends, for instance, in the Pantisocracy period) were communists. In general, they
ascribed all the evils of society to "institutions," and wanted them abolished.
Just how far Coleridge had gone in this direction by the autumn of 1793 we do not know;
far enough at least to disturb his view of the future, to worry his elder brother George, a
clergyman and school-teacher, who had in some measure filled a father's place to the
young genius, and, most important of all, to alarm and distress a gentle girl in London.
For before he left Christ's Hospital for Cambridge he had become intimate at the house of
a Mrs. Evans, and most of the letters preserved from his first two years at the University
were addressed to her or to one of her two daughters, Anne and Mary. With the latter
Coleridge was in love; and that she had some regard for him is apparent from a letter she
sent him in 1794. Before that, however, Coleridge had taken a step that seemed likely to
close at once his college career and his prospects of literary fame. The reasons have not
been recorded: probably pecuniary embarrassment, the yeasty state of his religious and
political ideas, and impatience or despondency over his love-affair with Mary Evans,
combined to precipitate his flight; what we know is that he ran away from Cambridge and
in December, 1793, enlisted as a dragoon in the army.
Coleridge had hardly taken the step before he repented of it. His letters to his brother
George, who with other friends bestirred himself for Coleridge's release as soon as his

whereabouts was discovered, are rather distressing in their self-abasement. The efforts of
his friends were successful and in April he returned to the University, where a public
admonition was the extent of his punishment, and he continued in receipt of his Christ's
Hospital exhibition.
But Coleridge's college days were practically over. He was now nearly twenty-two years
old, and the revolutionary unrest which had doubtless contributed to his first escapade
soon resulted in the formation of schemes that took him away from Cambridge for good
and all. In June, 1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met
Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them out of which,
before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of Pantisocracy. A company of
gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to America, take up lands in the Susquehanna
valley, and there establish an ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and
find happiness in a life of justice, labor, and love. The education of the young in the
principles of ideal humanity was an important part of the scheme. We are reminded of the
Brook Farm experiment in New England a generation later, which bears a daughter's
likeness to Pantisocracy, the chief difference being that the New England enthusiasts
were mature men and women and really put the idea into practice, whereas the
Pantisocrats were for the most part collegians and never got beyond the stage of talking
and writing about their plans. The scheme was further elaborated at Bristol, where
Coleridge, returning from a vacation tour in Wales, again met Southey, and at Bath, the
home of Southey and of Southey's betrothed and her sister, Edith and Sarah Fricker--"two
sisters, milliners of Bath," as Byron contemptuously called them.
To the other sister, Sarah, Coleridge rather precipitately engaged himself. His love for
Mary Evans was not dead, but he seems to have despaired of winning her and to have
determined, by uniting himself domestically with Southey and his friends, to make retreat
from their communistic scheme impossible. A few weeks later he is back at Cambridge,
tortured apparently between his old love and his new engagement. Mary Evans has
written to him deploring his wild notions and the mad plan of Pantisocracy, yet confident
that he has "too much sensibility to be an infidel." Southey has reproved him rather
sharply for failing to write to his betrothed at Bath. Our next glimpse of him is at London,
discussing poetry and philosophy with Lamb at the "Salutation and Cat" tavern and
perhaps trying to get a sight of Mary Evans. In December he is again at Bristol, in lively
correspondence with Southey about democracy, Pantisocracy, and poetry, but at the same
time he addresses a last appeal to Miss Evans. Her answer is kind, but final; that chapter
is closed, and Coleridge writes to Southey that he will "do his duty," by which he means
apparently that he will be faithful to Pantisocracy and marry Sarah