Οὕτως πάντα πρὸς ἑαυτὴν ἐπάγουσα, καὶ συνηθροισμένη ψυχὴ αὐτὴ εἰς αὐτὴν, ῥαῖστα καὶ μάλα βεβαίως μακαρίζεται. (Thus spirit bringing all things to itself, and being itself collected into itself, is most easily and most surely made happy.) MARINUS. Omnis divinæ atque humanæ eruditionis elementa tria, NOSSE, VELLE, POSSE: quorum principium unum MENS, sive SPIRITUS; cujus Oculus est RATIO; cui lumen præbet DEUS. Vita di G. B. Vico, p. 50. (Of all divine and human learning there are three elements, Knowledge, Intention, Power; of which there is one moving principle, Mind or Spirit; whose eye is Reason; whose light is from God.) PREFATORY NOTE. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, the author of the following work, was born on the 20th of October, 1772, at the parish of Ottery St. Mary, in the County of Devon, where his father held the vicarage. His early education he received at Christ's Hospital, where Charles Lamb was one of his schoolfellows. Up to his fourteenth year, he describes himself as a "playless day-dreamer;" but a stranger who met him in London, and was struck by his conversation, made him a member of a circulating library there, in which, as a reader, he acquired an ample stock of literary information. Attracted by the subjects of poetry and metaphysics (a love of the former being aroused by a perusal of Bowles's sonnets), he pursued the study of these two branches of literature, and afterwards became highly distinguished in both. His chief works indeed are poetical, metaphysical, or both together. In 1791, having obtained his presentation from Christ's Hospital, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, being then nineteen years of age. At college he appeared to possess little mathematical ability, but he succeeded better in classics, gaining in his first year the Browne's gold medal for a Greek ode. About 1794 he became acquainted with Robert Southey, who was subsequently poet-laureate. Coleridge and Southey were married on the same day to two sisters, and they removed to Nether Stowey, near Bridgewater, in Somersetshire, where they met Wordsworth. While residing at Nether Stowey, Coleridge composed some of his finest poems, including his "Ancient Mariner," the "Ode on the Departing year," and the first part of "Christabel," the melodies of which were imitated by both Scott and Byron with no remarkable success. Coleridge was, up to this time, a Unitarian, and frequently preached to congregations of that denomination. Hazlitt, who was on one occasion a listener, characteristically describes himself as delighted with the sermon, and compared it to the "music of the spheres." By the liberality of Messrs. Wedgwood, the eminent Staffordshire potters, Coleridge was enabled to visit Germany, where he resided upwards of a year, and formed an acquaintance with the German language and literature. In 1800 he returned to England, and went to reside with Southey at Keswick, Wordsworth living at that time at Grasmere. Whilst residing at the lakes, |