“Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang,
    The thought of her was like a flash of light,
    Or an unseen companionship, a breath
    Of fragrance independent of the wind.”

Another poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom William and Dorothy Wordsworth now met, calls her “Wordsworth’s exquisite sister.”  “She is a woman indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. . . .  In every motion her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say ‘Guilt was a thing impossible with her.’”

Chapter LXXV WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE—­THE LAKE POETS

AFTER Coleridge and Wordsworth once met they soon became fast friends, and in order to be near Coleridge the Wordsworths moved to another house near Nether Stowey in Somersetshire.

Coleridge was two years or more younger than Wordsworth, having been born in 1772.  He was the thirteenth child of his father, who was a clergyman.  As a boy he was sensitive and lonely, liking better to day-dream by himself than to play with his fellows.  While still a mere child he loved books.  Before he was five he had read the Arabian Nights, and he peopled his day dreams with giants and genii, slaves and fair princesses.  When he was ten he went to school at Christ’s Hospital, the Bluecoat School.  Here he met Charles Lamb, who also became a writer, and whose Essays and Tales from Shakespeare I hope you will soon read.

At school even his fellows saw how clever Coleridge was.  He read greedily and talked with any one who would listen and answer.  In his lonely wanderings about London on “leave days” he was delighted if he could induce any stray passer-by to talk, especially, he says, if he was dressed in black.  No subject came amiss to him, religion, philosophy, science, or poetry.  From school Coleridge went to Cambridge, but after a time, getting into trouble and debt, he ran away and enlisted in a cavalry regiment under the name of Silas Tomkyn Comberback.

In a few months, however, he was discovered, and his brothers bought him out.  He then went back to Cambridge, but left again at the end of the same year without taking a degree.

Meantime, while on a visit to Oxford, he had met Southey, another poet who was at this time a student there.

Robert Southey was born in 1774, and was the son of a Bristol Linen draper, but he was brought up chiefly by an aunt in Bath.  At fourteen he went to school at Westminster, and later to Balliol College, Oxford.  When Coleridge met him he was just twenty, and Coleridge twenty-two.  Like Wordsworth, they were both fired with enthusiasm for the French Revolution, and they soon became friends.