day. The reader will, I trust, excuse this tribute of recollection to a man, whose severities, even now, not seldom furnish the dreams, by which the blind fancy would fain interpret to the mind the painful sensations of distempered sleep; but neither lessen nor dim the deep sense of my moral and intellectual obligations. He sent us to the University excellent Latin and Greek scholars, and tolerable Hebraists. Yet our classical knowledge was the least of the good gifts, which we derived from his zealous and conscientious tutorage. He is now gone to his final reward, full of years, and full of honors, even of those honors, which were dearest to his heart, as gratefully bestowed by that school, and still binding him to the interests of that school, in which he had been himself educated, and to which during his whole life he was a dedicated thing.

From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The discipline, my mind had undergone, Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum cursu, cincinnis, et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quæ sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figuræ essent mera ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiæ ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina ;*—removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect of which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it.

* [I presume this Latin to be Mr. Coleridge's own-not being able to find the passage in any other author, and believing that incalescentia is a good word not countenanced by any classic writer of Rome.-Ed.]

There are indeed modes of teaching which have produced, and are producing, youths of a very different stamp; modes of teaching, in comparison with which we have been called on to despise our great public schools, and universities,

in whose halls are hung

Armory of the invincible knights of old

modes, by which children are to be metamorphosed into prodigies. And prodigies with a vengeance have I known thus produced;-prodigies of self-conceit, shallowness, arrogance, and infidelity! Instead of storing the memory, during the period when the memory is the predominant faculty, with facts for the after exercise of the judgment; and instead of awakening by the noblest models the fond and unmixed love and admiration, which is the natural and graceful temper of early youth; these nurslings of improved pedagogy are taught to dispute and decide; to suspect all but their own and their lecturer's wisdom; and to hold nothing sacred from their contempt, but their own contemptible arrogance -boy-graduates in all the technicals, and in all the dirty passions and impudence of anonymous criticism. To such dispositions alone can the admonition of Pliny be requisite, Neque enim debet operibus ejus obesse, quod vivit. An si inter eos, quos nunquam vidimus, floruisset, non solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremus, ejusdem nunc honor præsentis, et gratia quasi satietate languescet? At hoc pravum, malignumque est, non admirari hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre, complecti, nec laudare tantum, verum etiam amare contingit.t

I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet,‡ were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form, (or in our school language a Grecian,) had been my patron and pro

* [Wordsworth. Poet. W. iii. p. 190.-Ed.]

[Epist. i. p. 16-Ed.]

[The volume here mentioned appears to have been the second edition of Mr. Bowles's Sonnets, published in 1789, and containing twenty-one in number. The first edition with fourteen sonnets only had been published half a year previously.--Ed.]

tector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta :

qui laudibus amplis

Ingenium celebrare meum, calamumque solebat,
Calcar agens animo validum. Non omnia terræ
Obruta; vivit amor, vivit dolor; ora negatur

Dulcia conspicere; at flere et meminisse relictum est.*

It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I labored to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author.

Though I have seen and known enough of mankind to be well aware, that I shall perhaps stand alone in my creed, and that it will be well, if I subject myself to no worse charge than that of 。ingularity; I am not therefore deterred from avowing, that I regard, and ever have regarded the obligations of intellect among the most sacred of the claims of gratitude. A valuable thought, or a particular train of thoughts, gives me additional pleasure, when I can safely refer and attribute it to the conversation or correspondence of another. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy.† Nothing else

* [Petrarc. Epist. I. 1. Barbato Subnonensi. Bishop Middleton left Christ's Hospital on the 26th of September, 1788, on having been elected to Pembroke College, Cambridge.-Ed.]

["Come back into memory," says Lamb, "like as thou wast in the day. spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee-the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge.-Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!-How have I seen the casual passer through the cloister stand stili, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between

pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my
mind. Poetry (though for a school-boy of that age, I was
above par in English versification, and had already produced two
or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without refer-
ence to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity,* and which
had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old
master was at all pleased with)—poetry itself, yea, novels and
romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings
on our leave-dayst (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any
connections in London), highly was I delighted, if any passenger,
especially if he were dressed in black, would enter into conversa-
tion with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my
favorite subjects

Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fixed fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost.

This preposterous pursuit was, beyond dc abt, injurious both to my
natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would
perhaps have been destructive had it been continued ; but from
this I was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an acciden-
tal introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however by the
genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly,
so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the
sonnets and other early poems of Mr. Bowles. Well would it
have been for me perhaps had I never relapsed into the same
mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flowers and
reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving
in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And
if in after-time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mis-
the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy
deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Iamblichus, or Plotinus (for
even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or
reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar,-while the walls of the old Grey
Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy !"-Prose Works,
i. p. 46.-Ed.]

* [See amongst his Juvenile Poems the lines entitled, Time real and imaginary (Poet. Works, p. 19), which is the first decided indication of his poetic and metaphysical genius together, and was written in his sixteenth year.-Ed.]

The Christ's Hospital phrase, not for holidays altogether, but for those on which the boys are permitted to go beyond the precincts of the school

managed sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original tendencies to develop themselves;—my fancy, and the love of nature, and the sense of beauty in forms and sounds.*

[For not to think of what I needs must feel,
But to be still and patient, all I can ;
And haply by abstruse research to steal

From my own nature all the natural man—
This was my sole resource, my only plan:
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.

Poet. Works, p. 181.

The passage in the text has been more than once cited by those who cite nothing else from the writings of Coleridge, as warning authority against the pursuit of metaphysic science. With what candor or good sense let those judge, who know and appreciate the persistent labor of his life, and recollect that all the great verities of religion are ideas, the practical apprehension of, and faith in which, have in every age of the Church been, as from the constitution of the human mind they must necessarily be, vitally affected by the metaphysic systems from time to time prevailing. It is indeed to be observed, that those who are so zealous in decrying metaphysic, and more especially psychological investigations, and spend entire sermons in reasoning against reason, have nevertheless invariably a particular system of metaphysics and even of psychology of their own, which they will as little surrender as examine. And what system?-In nine cases out of ten, a patchwork of empirical positions, known historically to be directly repugnant to the principles maintained as well by the Reformers as the Fathers of the Catholic Church, and leading legitimately to conclusions subversive of the fundamental articles of the Christian faith. That those conclusions indeed have not been able to obtain a fixed footing within our Church, as they have long since done to a fearful extent elsewhere, is, under God's providence, mainly attributable to the reading of the Liturgy and Scriptures in the ears of the people. Yet who will not tremble at the dilemma in the case of an individual clergyman, who either sees the contra riety between his philosophical and religious creeds, and continues to hold both, or not seeing it, is at the mercy of the first Socinian reasoner who helps him to perceive it?

This vulgar scorn of the science of the human mind, its powers, capacities, and objects, as an essential part or fore-ground of the science of theology, is to be found passim in the written and oral teaching of those who, to use a confessedly inaccurate but very significant phrase, lead the Calvin istic and Arminian parties within the Church in England. To the former

G*