English Men of Letters: Coleridge

The years 1797 and 1798 are generally and justly regarded as the blossoming-time of Coleridge's poetic genius. It would be scarcely an exaggeration to say that they were even mo...

The reflections of the worthy Master of Jesus upon the strange reply of the wayward young undergraduate would have been involved in even greater perplexity if he could have look...

The life led by Coleridge during the six years next ensuing is difficult to trace, even in the barest outline; to give a detailed and circumstantial account of it from any ordin...

The critic who would endeavour to appreciate the position which Coleridge fills in the history of literature and thought for the first half of the nineteenth century must, if he...

We are now approaching the turning-point, moral and physical, of Coleridge's career. The next few years determined not only his destiny as a writer but his life as a man. Betwee...

The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till they had seen their joint volume through the press. The _Lyrical Ballads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798,...

Never was human being destined so sadly and signally to illustrate the _coelum non animum_ aphorism as the unhappy passenger on the _Speedwell_. Southey shall describe his condi...

On the 21st of October 1772 there was added to that roll of famous Englishmen of whom Devonshire boasts the parentage a new and not its least illustrious name. SAMUEL TAYLOR COL...

For the years which now remained to Coleridge, some sixteen in number, dating from his last appearance as a public lecturer, his life would seem to have been attended with somet...

year, and proved more successful with the public than with the critic of Drury Lane. The "general reader" assigned no "ludicrous objections to its metaphysics;" on the contrary,...

In spite of all the struggles, the resolutions, and the entreaties which displayed themselves so distressingly in the letter to Mr. Allsop, quoted in the last chapter, it is dou...

From the close of this series of lectures in the month of May 1808 until the end of the year it is impossible to trace Coleridge's movements or even to determine the nature of h...

The results of the step which Coleridge had just taken became speedily visible in more ways than one, and the public were among the first to derive benefit from it. For not only...