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daily, and his friend from Cambridge, Coleridge, whose poems you will oblige me by subscribing to, either at Hookham's or Edwards's. He is of most uncommon merit,―of the strongest genius, the clearest judgment, the best heart. My friend he already is, and must hereafter be yours.' 1 '1 It was then that Pantisocracy was hatched. Southey gave his account of the matter to Cottle in a letter dated March 5th, 1836 In the summer of 1794 S. T. Coleridge and Hucks came to Oxford on their way into Wales for a pedestrian tour. Then Allen introduced them to me, and the scheme was talked of, but not by any means determined on. It was talked into shape by Burnett and myself, when, upon the commencement of the long vacation, we separated from them, they making for Gloucester, he and I proceeding on foot to Bath. After some weeks S. T. C., returning from his tour, came to Bristol on his way and slept there. Then it was that we resolved upon going to America, and S. T. C. and I walked into Somersetshire to see Burnett, and on that journey it was that he first saw Poole.* He made his engagement with Miss [Sarah] Fricker on our return from this journey at my mother's house in Bath, not a little to my astonishment, because he had talked of being deeply in love with a certain Mary Evans. I had previously been engaged to my poor Edith [Fricker]. . . . He remained at Bristol till the close of the vacation-several weeks. During that time it was that we talked of America. The funds were to be what each could raise-S. T. C. by the Specimens of the Modern Latin Poets,2 for which he had printed proposals, and obtained a respectable list of Cambridge subscribers before I knew him; I, by Joan of Arc, and what else I might publish. I had no . . . other expectation. We hoped to find companions with money.’3 As far as regards himself, individually, Southey's rapid sketch needs little filling in. He omits to record the joint composition of The Fall of Robespierre, the history of which will be found in Note 228,' p. 646; and to describe 'Pantisocracy.' The most complete account of the scheme is to be found in a letter written by Thomas Poole a few weeks after it had been explained to him by Southey and Coleridge Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal principles are to embark with twelve ladies in April next,' fixing themselves in some 'delightful part of the new back settlements' of America. The labour of each man, for two or three hours a day, it was imagined, would suffice to support the colony. The produce was

* See the account of this visit in Thomas Poole and his Friends, by Mrs. H. Sandford, 1888, i. chap. vi. To Poole, 'Coldridge' appeared to 'possess splendid abilities.' 'He speaks with much elegance and energy, and with uncommon facility, but he . . . feels the justice of Providence in the want of those inferior abilities which are necessary to the rational discharge of the common duties of life. His aberrations from prudence, to use his own expression, have been great; but he now promises to be as sober and rational as his most sober friends could wish. In religion, he is a Unitarian, if not a Deist; in politicks a Democrat, to the utmost extent of the word.' Southey appeared 'more violent in his principles than even Coldridge himself. In religion... I fear he wavers between Deism and Atheism.' Poole's nephew John, who was present, wrote in his Diary for the 18th August:

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3 The letter is printed in Cottle's Reminiscences, pp. 402-407, but very inaccurately. I quote from the original now in the Fonthill collection. Cottle has falsified the second sentence of the above extract, printing it thus: 'Allen introduced them to me, and the scheme of Pantisocracy was introduced by them; talked of, by no means determined on.' (The italics are Cottle's) There are many other garblings, but this is the most important.

4 T. Poole and his Friends, i. 96-99.

to be common property, there was to be a good library, and the ample leisure was to be devoted to study, discussion, and to the education of the children on a settled system. The women were to be employed in taking care of the infant children and in other suitable occupations, not neglecting the cultivation of their minds. Among other matters not yet determined was whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved, if agreeable to one or both parties.' Every one was to enjoy his own religious and political opinions, provided they do not encroach on the rules previously made.' 'They calculate that every gentleman providing £125 will be sufficient to carry the scheme into execution.'1

Coleridge's Welsh tour was minutely and not uninterestingly described by his companion Hucks; 2 and Coleridge himself wrote a brief account of a part of it in a letter to a friend at Jesus.3 The letter contains a remarkable passage regarding Mary Evans. As Coleridge and Hucks were standing at the window of the inn at Wrexham (July 13th or 14th) Mary and one of her sisters passed. "Mary," he exclaimed, "quam afflictum et perdite amabam, yea, even to anguish!" They both started, and gave a short cry, almost a shriek. I sickened, and well-nigh fainted, but instantly retired. Had I appeared to recognise her, my fortitude would not have supported me.

'Vivit, sed mihi non vivit-nova forte marita
Ah! dolor! alternis carâ a cervice pependit.
Vos male fida valete accensa insomnia mentis
Littora amata, valete! vale, ah! formosa Maria.

... God bless her! Her image is in the sanctuary of my bosom, and never can it be torn from thence but with the strings that grapple my heart to life. . . . But love is a local anguish: I am fifty miles distant, and am not half so miserable.'

This relation makes it clear that the even flow of brother-and-sisterly affection between Coleridge and Mary Evans had been disturbed, and imparts some colour to the theory that disappointed love had had more or less to do with the flight from Cambridge eight months before. It explains, though it hardly justifies, the readiness with which Coleridge, to Southey's natural surprise, engaged himself, a few weeks afterwards, to Sarah Fricker. Under this hasty engagement he quitted Bristol for London about the end of August, there endeavoured unsuccessfully to find a publisher for The Fall of Robespierre, and saw much of an old schoolfellow, who recommended the Susquehanna as suitable for the Pantisocrats' purpose-' from its excessive beauty, and its security from hostile Indians and bisons.' 'Literary characters,' he said, 'make money there,' and 'the mosquitoes are not so bad as our gnats.' Writing to Southey from Cambridge, a fortnight later, he declares that he is evolving a scheme of Pantisocracy which shall have the tactitian excellence of the mathematician with the enthusiasm of the poet.' In the largest possible letters

1 A less detailed account was written, August 24, 1794, to Mr. C. Heath of Monmouth, by Coleridge himself. It was printed in the Monthly Repository for October 1834. The previous number contains two highly interesting letters from Coleridge written to Benj. Flower in 1796.

2 A Pedestrian Tour through North Wales, in a Series of Letters. By J. Hucks, B.A. London printed for J. Debrett, 1795, 12mo,

pp. 160.
It was on this tour that Coleridge
wrote the Lines at the King's Arms, Ross, and
On Bala Hill, p. 33.

3 H. Martin, to whom The Fall of Robespierre was dedicated, and afterwards a clergyman in Dorsetshire. The letter was first printed in the New Monthly Mag. for August 1836: and again in Biog. Lit. 1847, ii. 338, but some what inaccurately.

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he adds, Shad goes with us: he is my Brother!'-Shad' being the man-of-allwork of Southey's rich aunt, who a month later turned Southey out of her house on a wet night on hearing of his projected marriage and of Pantisocracy, vowing never to see his face again. If Coleridge gave any attention to his duties and privileges as an undergraduate at this period, it must have been intermittent. On the 24th October, Pantisocracy overflowed into, if it did not suggest, a serio-comic Monologue to a Young Jackass in Jesus Piece,1 which he afterwards toned down and sent to the Morning Chronicle.2 In November he lost a friend (a son of the Vicar of Ottery), and mourned over him in an elegy. It contains lines bewailing his own conditionlines ever memorable, though rather as a prophecy than as an expression of the passing mood which prompted them. 3

But there was another and a principal cause of distraction and agitation of which nothing has hitherto been known. It is revealed in the two letters to Mary Evans before mentioned. The sight of her in July had stirred his heart; but out of sight was out of mind, and believing there was a vacuum he incontinently filled it— as he thought, honestly enough, no doubt-with love for Sarah Fricker. Again, out of sight was out of mind, and he learned that there had been no vacuum to be filled. On the 21st October the lines, To my own Heart,4 were wrung from his despair of any fruition of the old love.

This very despair provoked a final attempt to fan an answering spark should such remain; or, in default, to learn beyond all doubt that none survived. This attempt was made by a letter to Mary Evans which, though undated, must have been written some time in December. It opens thus abruptly: 'Too long has my heart been the torture-house of suspense. After infinite struggles of irresolution, I will at least dare to request of you, Mary! that you will communicate to me whether or no you are engaged to Mr. [sic in orig.] I conjure you not to consider this request as presumptuous indelicacy. Upon mine honour I have made it with no other design or expectation than that of arming my fortitude by total hopelessness. Read this letter with benevolence, and consign it to oblivion. For four years I have endeavoured to smother a very ardent attachment-in what degree I have succeeded, you must know better than I can. . . . At first I voluntarily invited the recollection [of her virtues and graces] into my mind. I made them the perpetual object of my reveries. . . . At length it became a habit. I awoke from the delusion and found that I had unwittingly husbanded a passion which I felt neither the power nor the courage to subdue. . . . I saw that you regarded me merely with the kindness of a sister. What expectations could I form? I formed no expectations. I was ever resolving to subdue the disquieting passion: still some inexplicable suggestion palsied my efforts, and I clung with desperate fondness to this Phantom of Love, its mysterious attractions, and hopeless prospects. It was a faint and rayless hope !5 Yet it soothed my solitude with many a delightful daydream. It was a faint and rayless hope! yet I nursed it in my bosom with an agony of affection, even as a mother her sickly infant. . . . Indulge, Mary! this my first, my last request-and restore me to Reality, however gloomy. Sad and full of heaviness will the intelligence be-my heart will die within me. . . . I will not disturb your peace by even a look of discontent, still less will I offend your ear by

1 See 'APPENDIX C,' p. 477

2 Ib. and p. 35.

3 Lines on a Friend who died of a Frenzy

Fever, H. 35-46, p. 35. See also 'Note 60,' p. 573.

4 On a Discovery made too late, p. 34. See also 'Note 57,' p. 571.

5 Compare On a Discovery made too late, P. 34.

the whine of selfish Sensibility. In a few months I shall enter at the Temple,1 and there seek forgetful calmness where alone it can be found in incessant and useful activity.'

The letter closes with an assurance that if his rival is to be made happy he will be congratulated and not hated; and ends as abruptly as it began, with the simple signature, 'S. T. Coleridge,' and this postscript, 'I return to Cambridge to-morrow morning.' This seems to show that the letter was written before the end of the term (middle of December), in which case Mary's answer was far from being prompt.

94 Coleridge's response to it is dated 'December 24, 1794,' and opens thus: 'I have

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this moment received your letter, Mary Evans.

Its firmness does honour to your understanding, its gentleness to your humanity. You condescend to accuse yourself unjustly you have been altogether blameless. In my wildest dream of Vanity, I never supposed that you entertained for me any other than a common friendship. To love you habit has made unalterable. This passion, however, divested, as it now is, of all shadow of Hope, will lose its disquieting. . . . He cannot long be wretched who dares to be actively virtuous. . . . May God infinitely love you!S. T. COLERIDGE.' About the middle of December, a few days before the close of the Michaelmas term, Coleridge quitted Cambridge without taking his degree.*

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But not for Bristol. He did not even write, either to his fiancée or to Southey. They, and also Pantisocracy, seem to have been forgotten. He went to London and remained there, solacing his grief in the sympathetic society of Charles Lamb, and confiding his opinion on things in general to the public by way of Sonnets 2 addressed to Eminent Characters,' through the Morning Chronicle. It was of this period that Lamb wrote two years later: You came to town, and I saw you at a time when your heart was yet bleeding with recent wounds. Like yourself, I was sore galled with disappointed hope. . . . I imagine to myself the little smoky room at the "Salutation and Cat," where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with Poesy.' 3 The friends at Bristol gradually lost all patience. Coleridge did not come back to Bristol,' wrote Southey to Cottle, 4 till January 1795, nor would he, I believe, have come back at all, if I had not gone to London to look for him. For having got there from Cambridge at the beginning of winter, there he remained without writing to Miss F[ricker] or to me.' With some

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* Dr. Carlyon (Early Years, etc. i. 27), apparently on the authority of Dr. Pearce (Master of Jesus College in Coleridge's time), states that when remonstrated with on his conduct, Coleridge 'cut short the argument by bluntly assuring his friend and master, that he mistook the matter altogether. He was neither Jacobin (he said) nor Democrat, but a Pantisocrat.' Dr. Brandl (Life of Coleridge, p. 80) suggests that Coleridge did not take his degree, because he could not have signed the Thirty-nine Articles, and adds (on what authority is not stated) that Dr. Pearce gave him the benefit of the whole winter term for his return, before removing, as he was bound to do, his name from the College boards. Finally, he obtained for him one reprieve more, up to the 14th June 1795.' In the official 'List of [C.H.] University Exhibitioners' it is stated that Coleridge's case was

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considered by the C. H. Committee on the 22nd April 1795, which then seems to have learnt for the first time of his absence from Cambridge from Nov. 1793 to April 1794; and also that he had left Cambridge a few days before the expiration of the Michaelmas term in 1794. In this way ended Coleridge's official relations with Christ's Hospital and Jesus College.

1 So far as I am aware, no other record of this project exists.

2 See pp. 38-43; and 'Notes' 64-73, PP. 574, 575.

3 Letter to Coleridge, June 10, 1796. Cf. letters of June 14 and December 2, 1796. See also 'Note 57,' p. 571. The tavern (17 Newgate Street) survived as such till 1884, when it was burnt down.

4 Reminiscences, p. 405-text corrected by the original letter.

difficulty, Southey found him at the Angel' Inn in Butcher Hall Street, and carried him off to Bristol. There was probably too much joy there over the recovery of the truant to permit of reproaches, for the relations with Sarah and with Pantisocracy, broken by Coleridge's long silence (the result, it is to be feared, of faded interest), were renewed. At all events they were patched up, and Coleridge recommenced ardent lover and Pantisocrat. The scheme, Cottle assures us, was 'the favourite theme of his discourse.'

Finance, naturally, was the difficulty. Coleridge, Southey, and Burnett lodged together at 48 College Street. Burnett's father was a well-to-do Somersetshire farmer, and sympathetic; Southey had nothing, and those of his relatives who had something were antagonistic; Coleridge had nothing, and ignored his relatives altogether. Lovell, who had married Mary Fricker, could probably have provided his share of the common capital, but without Coleridge and Southey no move could be made. About a month after Coleridge's recapture, Southey wrote to Bedford (February 8, 1795): Coleridge is writing at the same table ;* our names are written in the book of destiny, on the same page'; and he went on to expound a scheme of publishing a magazine, to be edited by Coleridge and himself. money by journalism, but opportunities failed; and they tried on politics and religion, Southey on history. Their relations Pantisocratic, for Southey declared, two years later, that his earnings during the earlier half of 1795 were as four to one of Coleridge's, and that, besides supporting himself, he almost supported Coleridge. Of all the lecturing, nothing remains to us but what is contained in three little pamphlets.1

Both hoped to get lecturing Coleridge seem to have been

Lovell had lost no time in introducing Coleridge to Cottle, then a young printer, bookseller, and poetaster. He was very friendly to the Pantisocrats, and when they could not quite make up a seven weeks' lodging bill, he lent them a five-pound note, delighted to be thus assured that the foolish emigration scheme was not progressing materially. Soon after this he offered Coleridge thirty guineast for a

*Life and Corr. of R. S. i. 231. On January 29, 1810, Southey wrote to Miss Barker (Letters of R. S. ii. 188) of his intercourse with Coleridge in 1795: 'Disliking his inordinate love of talking, I was naturally led to avoid the same fault; when we were alone, and he talked his best (which was always at those times), I was pleased to listen; and when we were in company, and I heard the same things repeated-repeated to every fresh company, seven times in the week if we were in seven parties-still I was silent. . . . His habits have continued, and so have mine.' This habit of unlimited repetition was noted by Coleridge's clerk at Malta.

...

† A statement that he only received half the sum, having been forgetfully made by Coleridge in later life, and adopted by some biographers, it seems only fair to Cottle to say that I have seen Coleridge's stamped receipt for the whole. It runs as follows:-' Received, the 28th March 1796, the sum of Thirty guineas, for the copyright of my Poems, beginning with the "Monody

on the Death of Chatterton," and ending with "Religious Musings.' (Signed) S. T. COLERIDGE.'

1 A Moral and Political Lecture, delivered at Bristol, by S. T. Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge. Bristol: printed by George Routh, in Corn Street. Price Sixpence. [1795.] This was probably published soon after the oral delivery in February. In November it was reprinted with some alterations as the first of two Conciones ad Populum; or, Addresses to the People. By S. T. Coleridge. 1795. I. Introductory Address. II. On the present War. The Preface is dated 'Clevedon, Nov. 16, 1795.' At the same time was published The Plot discovered; or, An Address to the People against Ministerial Treason. By S. T. Coleridge. Bristol, 1795. On the wrapper was the legend: 'A Protest against certain Bills. Bristol: printed for the Author, Nov. 28, 1795.' The 'Bills' were the Pitt and Grenville Acts for gagging Press and Platform. Both pamphlets are reprinted in Essays on his own Times.

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