The Argosy — page 135: what you’re looking at

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

120 Sanuel Taylor Coleridge. were all women of some degree of attraction both in mind and persom One was an actress in the Bristol theatre, one a schoolmistress, and one a milliner. ‘These three became respectively Mrs. Lovell, Mrs- Southey, and Mrs. Coleridge. The milliner was Coleridge’s wife. Coleridge’s choice was probably made somewhat in a hurry. Had he waited a little longer and reflected a little more on the subject of selecting a life’s companion, he would very likely have found and made his own a woman of more culture and refinement than the Bristol milliner. Yet still the union was, on the whole, a happy one. Sarah was endowed with sweetness and tenderness and with a fair share of natural wit and intelligence: and she loved her poet faith- fully to the end, though, for many years, circumstances compelled them to live entirely separate. Coleridge certainly never had any very high opinion of female intellect, and perhaps this arose from his having a woman of not much education for a wife. The scheme for emigration melted into thin air from mere want of funds ; Coleridge and Southey having quite enough to do to support themselves and their young wives, let alone talking of paying their passage to America. <A kindly Bristol bookseller, who was also ai man of literary discernment, and who saw the dawn of genius in the two young men, gave them sufficient work to keep the pot boiling. This: bookseller’s name was Joseph Cottle. He paid Coleridge thirty guineas for a volume of poems, a sum which was considered quite a mine of wealth by husband and wife. He also helped him to start a periodical, which, however, had to be given up in a few months, because it did not pay its own expenses. Young Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge first lived in a cottage at Clevedon, which they rented for £5 a year, and which was so scantily pro- vided with household goods that, on the very evening of their arrival there, Coleridge wrote to Southey asking him to send him from Bristol, as quickly as he could, a kettle and a toasting-fork, together with many other indispensable articles. As we speak the well-loved and honoured names of our two great poets, there is some- thing half touching, half ludicrous in the thought of their means being so small that such communications needed to pass between them ; and we wonder a little what Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs. Southey were about, that they, instead of their husbands, did not attend to such matters. Yet still, on the other hand, this list of articles wanted in the Clevedon cottage, suggests a pretty thought of the picnic- like sort of life the young pair must have led in their earliest married days. What laughter there must have been over strange makeshifts, what wit must have leapt from the lips of the poet, what graceful, winsome perplexities on the part of the bride housekeeper ! Coleridge walked into Bristol daily from Clevedon, there to find any employment Joseph Cottle could give him. After a while he grew tired of this, and then the young couple gave up the cottage to inhabit apartments in Bristol. They did not remain in these very long; the Conniclooolks, conn (A)