The Argosy — page 134: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Samuel Taylor Colendg?. 11g most unromantic fashion. Young Coleridge was discovered by his friends, his debts were paid by his relations, Mary Evans ceased to be a divinity in his fancy and became an exceedingly ordinary young woman, who wrought hideous figures in worsted-work, and played a tune or two indifferently on the harpsichord: and he went back to Cambridge and recommenced his undergraduate’s life there. Coleridge had been intended, since boyhood, for the Church. His mother had wished it, and his own inclinations had turned that way. At about this period, however, there occurred a change in his religious views which rendered it impossible for him conscientiously to take holy orders. Hehad become unfortunately tainted with the doctrines of Unitarianism ; so he gave up all thoughts of the Church as a pro- fession, and resolved to try to make a living out of literature. His genius was beginning to wake up, and he was growing to understand | something of its power and breadth and height. It may be as well to say here that Unitarianism did not remain Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s creed for many years; he returned to the doctrines of the Church of England, and became an earnest, if sometimes erring, yet faithful follower of her teaching, and observer of her forms. We may deplore the vacillation of such a man as Coleridge in so grave a matter as his religious opinions, yet of one thing we may be certain: he was always sincere. : But to return to young Coleridge at Cambridge, when he deter- mined to give up the calling of a clergyman. Coleridge left the university without bearing away with him any laurels in the shape of honours that he had gained there. He was much attracted by the tone of some lectures which Robert Southey, as yet as much to fame unknown as himself, was delivering at Oxford. He went thither, and was introduced to him by some mutual acquaint- ance, and the two became, from that time forward, close friends, There were many notes of sympathetic harmony between them. . They were both poets, the natures of both were innately noble and generous, they were both full of beautiful but impossible dreams concerning freedom and the improvement of the human race. Both Southey and Coleridge went to Bristol, where they found and became intimate with a young man called Lovell, who held much the same grand, erratic opinions as themselves. ‘The three, together, formed a project for emigrating to America, colonising land on the Susquehanna, and becoming the founders of a glorious new Republic, While they were waiting in Bristol to mature and carry out the plan, which was full of splendid golden dreams for the future, but sadly in want of a little solid capital in the present, the three young men, having not much else to do, employed their time in falling in love. Matrons would be needed to strike the key-note of society in the new Republic, and they could not do better than set about pro- viding themselves with these necessaries at once. ‘There were three Misses Fricker with whom they had happened to fall in, and who GOmiGcsooks (A) (CO) am