O God! how wonderful are Thy works!  Thou makest the rotting log to nourish banks of violets, and from the stagnant pool at Thy word springs forth the lotus that covers all with fragrance and beauty!

* * * * *

Coleridge in his youth was brilliant—­no one disputes that.  He dazzled Charles and Mary Lamb from the very first.  Even when a Blue-Coat he could turn a pretty quatrain, and when he went away to Cambridge and once in a long while wrote a letter down to “My Own C.L.,” it was a feast for the sister, too.  Mary was different from other girls:  she didn’t “have company,” she was too honest and serious and earnest for society—­her ideals too high.  Coleridge—­handsome, witty, philosophic Coleridge—­was her ideal.  She loved him from afar.

How vain it is to ponder in our minds the what-might-have-been!  Yet how can we help wondering what would have been the result had Coleridge wedded Mary Lamb!  In many ways it seems it would have been an ideal mating, for Mary Lamb’s mental dowry made good Coleridge’s every deficiency, and his merits equalized all that she lacked.  He was sprightly, headstrong, erratic, emotional; she was equally keen-witted, but a conservative in her cast of mind.  That she was capable of a great and passionate love there is no doubt, and he might have been.  Mary Lamb would have been his anchor to win’ard, but as it was he drifted straight on to the rocks.  Her mental troubles came from a lack of responsibility—­a rusting away of unused powers in a dull, monotonous round of commonplace.  Had her heart found its home I can not conceive of her in any other light than as a splendid, earnest woman—­sane, well-poised, and doing a work that only the strong can do.  Coleridge has left on record the statement that she was the only woman he ever met who had a “logical mind”—­that is to say, the only woman who ever understood him when he talked his best.

Coleridge made progress at the Blue-Coat School:  he became “Deputy Grecian,” or head scholar.  This secured him a scholarship at Cambridge, and thither he went in search of honors.  But his revolutionary and Unitarian principles did not serve him in good stead, and he was placed under the ban.

At the same time a youth by the name of Robert Southey was having a like experience at Oxford.  Other youths had tried in days agone to shake Cambridge and Oxford out of their conservatism, and the result was that the embryo revolutionists speedily found themselves warned off the campus.  So through sympathy Coleridge and Southey met.  Coleridge also brought along a young philosopher and poet, who had also been a Blue-Coat, by the name of Lovell.

These three young men talked philosophy, and came to the conclusion that the world was wrong.  They said society was founded on a false hypothesis—­they would better things.  And so they planned packing up and away to America to found an Ideal Community on the banks of the Susquehanna.  But hold! a society without women is founded on a false hypothesis—­that’s so—­what to do?  Now in America there are no women but Indian squaws.