poet's brothers died young, and his only sister, Anne, at twenty-one. Her he has immortalized in two lines: "Rest, gentle Shade, and wait thy Maker's will ; Circumstances, literally what stands around a man, being the offspring of general human activity, react upon individual human beings with irresistible effect. Men and circumstances, being of one blood, are indissolubly interwoven for weal or woe. Men make circumstances, and circumstances mold men. Even the most original natures, natures of such deep prolific power of soul that their mission is to generate new circumstances, whereby to lift human life to higher levels, even they cannot escape the pressure of present conditions. One of these generative minds was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a mind of such inward vitality that it poured fresh streams into the accumulated reservoirs of human thought. The mental movement which at its noon has the exceptional liveliness and momentum to generate new circumstances is apt in its morning to break from routine into a path of its own making. That in his early surroundings Coleridge was not so favored as his friend Wordsworth is apparent from the subjoined account by himself of his childhood from his fourth to his ninth year. Wordsworth, to be sure, with his decision and will, would have so reacted upon such surroundings as to have modified or even changed them. For, of those who have in them the inborn force to make new circumstances it is the privilege (when they have the will and the self-control of a Wordsworth) to resist and in some measure to baffle existing ones. Coleridge was more passive, more practically helpless than his illustrious friend. This passage, so valuable as biography, is worth something as premonition. But parents and teachers are irremediably incapable of discerning in the wayward sensitive boy an exceptional poetic genius, who ought to have exceptional treatment. Seldom does autobiography furnish a page so lively and instructive. "From October, 1775, to October, 1778. These three years I continued at the reading school, because I was too little to be trusted among my father's school-boys. . . . . My father was very fond of me, and I was my mother's darling; in consequence whereof I was very miserable. For Molly, who had nursed my brother Francis [next above Samuel Taylor in age], and was immoderately fond of him, hated me because my mother took more notice of me than of Frank; and Frank hated me because my mother gave me now and then a bit of cake when he had none, quite forgetting that for one bit of cake which I had and he had not, he had twenty sops in the pan, and pieces of bread and butter with sugar on them, from Molly, from whom I received only thumps and ill names. "So I became fretful, and timorous, and a tell-tale; and the school-boys drove me from play, and were always tormenting me. And hence I took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. I read through all gilt-cover little books that could be had at that time, and likewise all the uncovered tales of Tom Hickathrift, Fack the Giant-Killer, and the like. And I used to lie by the wall, and mope; and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood; and then I was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard, and act over again all I had been reading on the docks, the nettles, and the rank grass. At six years of age I remember to have read Belisarius, Rob inson Crusoe, and Philip Quarles; and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was at her needle) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark: and I distinctly recollect the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window where the book lay, and when the sun came upon it I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask and read. My father found out the effect which these books had produced, and burned them. "So I became a dreamer, and acquired an indisposition to all bodily activity; and I was fretful, and inordinately passionate; and as I could not play at anything, and was slothful, I was despised and hated by the boys and because I could read and spell, and had, I may truly say, a memory and understanding forced into almost unnatural ripeness, I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own age, and before I was eight years old I was a character. Sensibility, imagination, vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent and manifest. "From October, 1778, to 1779. That which I began to be from three to six, I continued to be from six to nine. In this year I was admitted into the Grammar School, and soon outstripped all of my age." Here is another relation of similar interest. Very rare are such autobiographic notes on the childhood of poets. How near were Christabel and the Ancient Mariner being sacrificed to that tender sensitiveness, that delicacy of cerebral fibre, out of which they grew! "I had asked my mother one evening to cut my cheese entire, so that I might toast it. This was no easy matter, it being a crumbly cheese. My mother however did it. I went into the garden for something or other, and in the mean time my brother Frank minced my cheese, to 'disappoint the favorite.' I returned, saw the exploit, and in an agony of passion flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow, flung himself on the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs. I hung over him mourning and in a |