to graduate.  From this time he seldom completed anything that he undertook.  It was characteristic of him, stimulated by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of founding with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna.  In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers were to work only two hours a day and were to have all goods in common.  The demand for poetry was at this time sufficiently great for a bookseller to offer Coleridge, although he was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty guineas for a volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred lines after finishing that volume.  With such wealth in view, Coleridge married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because no single people could join the new ideal commonwealth.  Southey married her sister; but the young enthusiasts were forced to abandon their project because they did not have sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean.

The tendency to dream, however, never forsook Coleridge.  One of his favorite poems begins with this line:—­

  “My eyes make pictures when they are shut."[16]

He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on prearranged lines, when he said, “I think that my soul must have preexisted in the body of a chamois chaser.”

In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at Nether-Stowey in Somerset.  Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to a house in the neighborhood in order to be near Coleridge.  The two young men and Dorothy Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one another.  Together they roamed over the Quantock Hills, gazed upon the sea, and planned The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is one of the few things that Coleridge ever finished.  In little more than a year he wrote nearly all the the poetry that has made him famous.

Had he, like Keats, died when he was twenty-five, the world would probably be wondering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have reached; but he became addicted to the use of opium and passed a wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, partly in the Lake District, but chiefly in a suburb of London, without adding to his poetic fame.  During his later years he did hack work for papers, gave occasional lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and became a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson.  It is only just to Coleridge to recognize the fact that even if he had never written a line of poetry, his prose would entitle him to be ranked among England’s greatest critics.

[Illustration:  COLERIDGE’S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY.]

Coleridge’s wide reading, continued from boyhood, made his contemporaries feel that he had the best intellectual equipment of any man in England since Francis Bacon’s time.  Once Coleridge, having forgotten the subject of his lecture, was startled by the announcement that he would speak on a difficult topic, entirely different from the one he had in mind; but he was equal to the emergency and delivered an unusually good address.