the ablative a somewhat difficult case to understand, he told them to think of it as the quale-quare-quidditive case, which of course makes its meaning perfectly clear.  In both these capacities the elder Coleridge was a sincere man, gentle and kindly, whose memory was “like a religion” to his sons and daughters.  In that same year was born Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the youngest of thirteen children.  He was an extraordinarily precocious child, who could read at three years of age, and who, before he was five, had read the Bible and the Arabian Nights, and could remember an astonishing amount from both books.  From three to six he attended a “dame” school; and from six till nine (when his father died and left the family destitute) he was in his father’s school, learning the classics, reading an enormous quantity of English books, avoiding novels, and delighting in cumbrous theological and metaphysical treatises.  At ten he was sent to the Charity School of Christ’s Hospital, London, where he met Charles Lamb, who records his impression of the place and of Coleridge in one of his famous essays.[224] Coleridge seems to have remained in this school for seven or eight years without visiting his home,—­a poor, neglected boy, whose comforts and entertainments were all within himself.  Just as, when a little child, he used to wander over the fields with a stick in his hand, slashing the tops from weeds and thistles, and thinking himself to be the mighty champion of Christendom against the infidels, so now he would lie on the roof of the school, forgetting the play of his fellows and the roar of the London streets, watching the white clouds drifting over and following them in spirit into all sorts of romantic adventures.

At nineteen this hopeless dreamer, who had read more books than an old professor, entered Cambridge as a charity student.  He remained for nearly three years, then ran away because of a trifling debt and enlisted in the Dragoons, where he served several months before he was discovered and brought back to the university.  He left in 1794 without taking his degree; and presently we find him with the youthful Southey,—­a kindred spirit, who had been fired to wild enthusiasm by the French Revolution,—­founding his famous Pantisocracy for the regeneration of human society.  “The Fall of Robespierre,” a poem composed by the two enthusiasts, is full of the new revolutionary spirit.  The Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehanna, was to be an ideal community, in which the citizens combined farming and literature; and work was to be limited to two hours each day.  Moreover, each member of the community was to marry a good woman, and take her with him.  The two poets obeyed the latter injunction first, marrying two sisters, and then found that they had no money to pay even their traveling expenses to the new Utopia.