SAMUEL TAYLOR, "the most imaginative of modern poets," was born in the year 1772, at Ottery St Mary, Devonshire. He was the son of the Rev. John Coleridge, vicar of Ottery. His father was a man of learning, and of singularly amiable qualities, but tainted with some of that eccentricity of habit and manner which characterised his youngest son. Coleridge wore in childhood many of those features of mind, which, in his after life, ripened into good or evil. He was dreamy, solitary, and disinclined to the usual amusements of children. Losing his father in very early life, he obtained, by the kindness of a friend, a presentation to Christ Church Hospital. He made extraordinary advances in scholarship; and amassed a vast variety of miscellaneous knowledge, but in the random desultory manner which displayed already the instability of purpose, that caused the future failure of his genius in the accomplishment of the great objects which its capacities fitted it for achieving. During this period, imprudent bathing, an exercise of which he was immoderately fond, sowed the seeds of those bodily maladies which not only impaired the efficiency of his genius, but which unconsciously allured him into the unhappy and insidious habit that completed the destruction of his constitution, and unhinged the structure of his mind. One conspicuous feature of his intellect at Christ Church was its strong tendency to metaphysical speculation. The young enthusiast feared not to gauge the profoundest questions, till his school-boy pride rejoiced in the dignity of infidelity. These notions were most judiciously, as he himself confesses, whipped out of him by his able but stern instructor, the Rev. James Bowyer, a gentleman, for whose services in his intellectual education Coleridge frequently records his affectionate gratitude. His reputation at Christ Church promised a brilliant career at Cambridge. This university he entered in 1790, in his nineteenth year. But the same desultory, unordered habit of mind he had displayed in early life, followed him to Jesus College. His incapability of economy involved him in debt; the immaturity of his speculations urged him into Unitarian opinions in religion. In the midst of his university career, afflicted with that bias towards melancholy, with which the poetical temperament, especially when coupled with an irritable bodily habit, is so often cursed, and dejected with the spectacle of unrealised hopes of college honours, he suddenly left Cambridge. After wandering for a day or two in London, having bestowed his last pence on a beggar, he recklessly enlisted, under an assumed name, in a regiment of horse. Discovered at length, and rescued from this degradation by his friends, he resumed his position at College. In 1794 he became acquainted at Oxford with his future relative Southey, and a warm friendship soon ripened between the young poets. Their position was in one respect similar, as Southey was forfeiting the honours of Oxford from his adoption, like Coleridge, of a Unitarian creed. Both had embraced, with enthusiasm, during the preceding two or three years, the ideas of "liberty" promulgated by the French revolution; and at Bristol, where Coleridge had joined Southey, they formed the resolution, along with a third poet, Lovell, of founding what they termed a Pantisocracy, or Republic of pure freedom, on the banks of the Susquehanna. The three poets married in 1795 three sisters, the Misses Fricker of Bristol; but the marriages upset the pantisocratic scheme, for which they had been intended as part preparation. The good sense of Southey, not to mention want of funds, exploded the idea; and Coleridge, who had settled at Clevedon, near Bristol, was thrown on his literary resources. After some attempts at publication, and the projection of extensive plans of occupation and industry, tired of his village retirement, he removed to Bristol, and appeared as the editor, or rather writer, of the "Watchman," a weekly political journal; but his indolent irregularity caused the extinction of his work at the tenth number. Failing in expectation of employment in the London press, he retired in the latter months of 1796, to a cottage at Nether Stowey, in Somerset, at the foot of Quantock Hills, on the grounds of Mr Poole, a gentleman whose friendship he has affectionately commemorated. Through this friend's means he became acquainted with Wordsworth and the two Wedgewoods. His name was soon associated with that of Wordsworth in the publication of the "Lyrical Ballads;" and a mutual resolution of the poets to write a play produced Coleridge's tragedy "Remorse." This was the most happy period of his life. His poetical faculty, which had budded in his sixteenth year, was ripened under the genial impulses of nature, friendship, and domestic affection. The first part of Christabel belongs to this year. He pursued his favourite metaphysical studies, oscillating between system and system, and his speculations were soon to receive new and important impressions from travel in Germany with Mr Wordsworth. Coleridge had accepted in 1798 the office of Unitarian preacher to a congregation in Shrewsbury, and had actually preached his first sermon—of which Hazlitt has recorded a glowing account—when the "generous and magnificent" offer of a life annuity from the two Wedgewoods extricated him from his Unitarian engagements, and enabled him to set out with Wordsworth for Germany. He was industrious in the study of the literature and philosophy of that country, and may be regarded as the introducer of German philosophy to the notice of British scholars. Shortly after his return, Coleridge and his family settled for some years with Southey, at Keswick, in the neighbourhood of Wordsworth. Meantime his opium-eating habit, into which he had been originally seduced from its apparent medicinal effects, had undermined his health, and in search of convalescence he went to Malta in 1804. He was appointed temporary secretary to Sir Alexander Ball, governor of that island. He returned by Italy to England in 1806. From this period till nearly 1816 he lived a wandering life—now with his family, now with one friend, again with another; sometimes lecturing, occasionally publishing. Letters and anecdotes injudiciously, if not cruelly, in reference to the poet's surviving relations, exposed to the world in Cottle's "Reminiscences," give a melancholy insight into Coleridge's condition during these years from the tyranny of opium. The capital defect in his character was want of will: the habit, which he could see, as it were a visible enemy, destroying his own happiness and that of those dearest to him, entangling him in meanness, deceit, and dishonesty, he could not summon resolution to resist. His letters and memoranda exhibit his sense of his slavery in words that might draw tears. In 1816, he placed himself under the care of Mr Gilman, surgeon, Highgate. With this generous family the poet resided till his death in 1834. He was cherished with affectionate solicitude, surrounded by friends who hung with rapture on his miraculous conversation. It is deeply to be regretted that his noble genius was to a great extent frittered in conversation, which he could pour forth unpremeditatedly for hours in uninterrupted streams of vivid, dazzling, original thinking. "Did you ever hear me preach?" said Coleridge to Lamb. "I never heard you do anything else," was his friend's reply. Certainly through this medium he watered with his instruction a large circle of discipleship; but what treasures of thought has the world lost by Coleridge's unwillingness to make his pen the mouth-piece of his mind! Some of his most important prose works, however, appeared during this period. Before his death, Gilman relates, he had succeeded in emancipating himself from his opium chain (see his "Prayer," Cottle, p. 483); but 1816 closes the portion of Coleridge's biography which is the property of the public; neither Gilman nor Cottle pass this boundary.

Coleridge's prose works embrace variety of the subjects most interesting to mankind—theology, history, politics, the principles of society; another sphere of his labours, partly oral and partly written, was literature and its criticism; a third comprehended logic and the transcendental metaphysics. These subjects occur in singular juxtaposition in more than one of his books. Independently of his Lectures and his contributions to periodicals, Coleridge's opinions were conveyed chiefly in "The Friend," his "Lay Sermons," his "Biographia Literaria," "Aids to Reflection," "Constitution of the Church and State," &c. Most of these works are fragmentary, or, at least collectively, they exhibit only part of his system of opinions, for Coleridge lived upon the future. His poetical works, consisting of "Juvenile Poems," "Sybilline Leaves," Odes, Ballads, Dramas, Translations, &c., exhibit the same feature of splendid incompleteness. After his death, collections were made of his "Table-talk," and other "Literary Remains," that rescued from oblivion much of his mind that is valuable.

The intellect of Coleridge is to be estimated rather by Coleridge, that of which it was capable, which it contemplated, and which it suggested, than by that which it achieved. Thrown upon life, poor and unsupported except by the benevolence of private friends, the inspired "charity boy," in his mission as the Apostle of Ideas, had a severe contest to fight. The friend of no party, he was obnoxious to all. Coleridge's bark sailed between the Scylla and Charybdis of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. It is to his credit, and to that of Southey and Wordsworth, that, in the face of a hostile age, they vindicated the freedom of poetical, political, and philosophical conscience; that, like the Scottish baron of old, they did "hide their time;" for all of them have left on the age that is succeeding an impress that will not soon be effaced. The literary fortitude of Coleridge under the continually-expressed conviction of the unpopularity of his writings is admirable. What would he not have achieved if this impassible fortitude had been animated by the aggressive vigour of industry and action so necessary in all who promulgate systems! The whole labours of Coleridge present the appearance of an unfinished city: the outline of the streets exhibits only how splendid they might have been; the basement of a pillar shows how gorgeous might have been its capital. A small, compact, complete beauty of poesy or of thought, pains us with the reflection that it stands surrounded by mere fragments of a similar promise. His works resemble a Californian valley, out of which may be dug in hundreds solid lumps of priceless gold from among materials useless or inappreciable. Besides the absence of a resolute will, another defect in the structure of Coleridge's mind was want of exactness. He had no capacity, he confesses himself, in the retention of facts; his mind was at home in the outline of generic ideas. Hence, while it could frequently chalk that outline with astonishing sagacity and philosophical accuracy, when it descended into the natural history of fact it frequently is found in "wandering mazes lost." This feature of the poet's intellect, in relation to theology, is illustrated with great clearness by the Rev. N. Porter in the American "Bibliotheca Sacra" (Vol. iv. No. 13). At an early period of his university career he lamented his distaste for the study of mathematics. Demonstrative and exact science lay beyond the dominion of his will; his was the logic of passion and imagination, as well as of the schools. His discussions often indicate this complexion of his reason. His own statement of his feelings in groping for religious truth through thorny regions of thought is, that "his head was with Spinoza and Leibnitz, while his heart was with Paul and John." The transcendental philosophy of Germany, acting on a mind of this semi-romantic temperament in inquiry, produced results resembling those of, as it were, metaphysical opium-eating. His metaphysical writings, encumbered with terminology, and algebraic symbols, stretching out into vast impalpable shadows, are frequently ungraspable as Ixion's cloud. And the haughty or embarrassed pretence (at the conclusion of vol. i. Biog. Lit., edit. 1817) that the age was unripe for the appreciation of his philosophical teachings, and his proud "Intelligibilia non intellectum adfero," are unworthy of a literary patriot, who should, for the objects of his mission, "make himself all things unto all men," and whose bread, if he had it to give, "cast upon the waters, would be found after many days." The bread he has left has been found, and to good purpose. His reputation has risen throughout Great Britain; and America, which is the empiric of all principles evolved by European physics or philosophy, has had her poetry, her philosophy, and even her theology, deeply tinctured by Coleridge.

With his ardent benevolence and desire for the moral and intellectual elevation of humanity, was mingled much Coleridge, of a species of academic contempt for the myriads of God's immortal and intelligent creatures, commonly characterized as "the masses." With the fear of the French revolution before him, he seems to have viewed them as "dogs of war," with innate tendencies to turn upon and rend society, especially when society deigned to cast before them her pearls of instruction and philosophy. He seems to have deemed that they should be nourished with food convenient not so much for themselves as for the peace and prosperity of the "clerisy" and "special state" whom he appoints their overseers; that an episcopal crook and an act of Parliament are the keys to the whole duty of man as a unit in the "masses;" that scholarship and philosophy walk in silver slippers in a higher sphere, and that learning is degraded when it is popularized. "From a philosophical populace, good Lord deliver us," is, if we remember rightly, one of his expressions of this contempt. If he wrote only for philosophers, who can wonder that he should complain of a somewhat unappreciating audience?

The increasing celebrity of Coleridge caused the agitation of a somewhat painful question—his alleged literary plagiarism. This was first hinted by Mr De Quincey in Tait's Magazine, September 1834.

The accusation was corroborated and extended by Professor Ferrier in Blackwood, April 1840; and it is still farther confirmed and extended by Sir W. Hamilton (in his notes to the Works of Dr Reid, p. 890), whose indignation is great against the "literary reaver of the 'Hercynian brakes,'" and who mercilessly convicts Coleridge of ruthless and universal plagiarism, except where his ignorance prevented him from entering, and of blundering on subjects with which the poet professed to be most familiar. The defence by his friends is timid, and scarcely enters within the sphere of legal evidence, while even his accusers absolve him in general from deliberate and premeditated dishonesty; yet, withal, with the air of mere tribute to his known talents and celebrity. The specific accusations are the following: that literal or ornamental translations from German poets, and these too in celebrated passages of Coleridge, are found unacknowledged for years after they were published among his poetical works; that whole pages of literal or interpolated translation occur, chiefly in the "Biographia Literaria," from the works of his German contemporary Schelling; that besides this he assumes as his own the theories of that philosopher and of others, and that Coleridge left a branch of his work unfinished exactly at the point where Schelling leaves him unsaid; nay, it is hinted, in the face of his own loud reclamation, that his principles of the criticism of Shakespeare are possibly to be put to the credit of Schlegel. His friends (especially his nephew and son-in-law, the late Rev. Henry Nelson Coleridge, in a prefatory discourse to the recent edition of the "Biog. Lit.") extricate him from a moral delinquency, by urging the known carelessness of his habits, the extent of his studies, and the defect of order in their arrangement; his custom of note-taking, which threw among his papers the thoughts of others, which his negligence or his recollection afterwards failed to recognise as not his own; again, there is urged the folly of which he would be convicted in wilfully concealing his obligations to writers the knowledge of whom he was pressing on the attention of his countrymen.

Coleridge more than once disclaims the imputation of vanity, but he also hints the idea that he has cause to be vain. If vanity is to be reckoned among the features of his mind, and much of his writing indicates this, while it is not inconsistent with the child-like simplicity ascribed to him, lie may have been tempted, on the one hand, to the over-statement of his claims to certain thought-property belonging to others; and, on the other, to the under-statement of his actual verbal obligations to them. That Coleridge expected accusations of plagiarism is evident from his earnest reclamations against the suspicion of that crime. Coleridge.

The vast extent of his line of thinking, often imperfectly defined as it was, would frequently come in contact with parallel lines of thought which he met with in his studies, matured and stereotyped by publication. He would feel impatient at seeing complete what had dawned as an outline in his own mind; he would entertain something like the feeling of having been defrauded of his property, and the present vivid impression, derived from his author, would be stamped on his own imperfect outline as the result of realized thought. In short, a process would take place in his intellect resembling that of Byron's baron in Mazeppa, who had pondered over the glories of his ancestors,

"Until, by some confusion led, He thought their merits were his own."

The miscalculation of vanity, excusable, except in respect to the manner in which he has talked (see Hamilton's Reid, p. 890), and is alleged to have talked of others (for his former best friends accuse him of traduction; see Southey's letter in Cottle's Reminiscences, p. 407), and carelessness, superinduced by his acknowledged habits of mind, seem to constitute the amount of Coleridge's plagiaristic guilt. He was at least generous of his own stores; his nephew, indeed, inserts this circumstance as part of his apology; if he took from others, he was lavish to others far beyond the mark of his own appropriations; if he was "appetens alieni," he was also "profusus sui." This, though no more abstractly justifiable in Coleridge than in Catiline, is so far blameless in the case of the former, that his "appetentia" was undeliberate and unintentional.

Coleridge's whole mind was imbued with the love of truth and of beauty; for truth he wandered through the mazes of all philosophy, and wherever he found her, he grappled her to his soul with hooks of steel. When an extended horizon of Christianity enabled him to see the real position of his Socinian opinions, he embraced unchangeably with his whole heart "the truth as it is in Jesus." The very obscurities of Coleridge are "dark with excessive bright;" from his intense feeling of the beautiful, they are "golden mists" that rise from the morning of a pure heart; or they are lucid seas whose very depth prevents the eye from penetrating its extent. His prose style is disfigured by turgidity, and the affected use of words. His written humour is ponderous and unwieldy.

He was capable of immense services to poetry; but in this, as in other spheres of labour, he lived on the future; and Coleridge's future was a bad bank on which to draw; its bills were perpetually dishonoured. The conspicuous features of his poetry are its exquisite and original melody of versification, whose very sound chains the ear and soul; the harmonious grouping and skilful colouring of his pictures; statueness and purity of taste in his living figures, and truth, in luxuriance or in simplicity, in majesty or in smallness, in his descriptions of nature. In sentiment, he opens with charming artlessness his own bosom in sorrow and in joy; this, it may be remarked, is a feature characteristic of the poetry of our own age above all that have preceded. There exists in general a decided contrast between the simplicity and lucidness of Coleridge's poetical style of expression, and the involved cloud-like fashion of his prose. Apart from his German translations and his dramas, there are few compositions of any extent complete in the works of Coleridge. "Christabel" is a fragment—a beauteous strain creeping in the ear, mysterious yet entrancing as a celestial melody; but the import of whose language we scarcely comprehend, while we feel its sweetness. Capriciously it ceases in a moment, and leaves us in the position of Ariel's admirers in the tune played by the picture of nobody. The "Ancient Mariner" is, apart from certain defects in machinery, a composition the stature of whose idea "reaches the sky," and stretches its arms into other worlds; but it vanishes from the reader's grasp in a huddled conclusion—a moral utterly partial, like that of "Christabel," when viewed in reference to the piece as a whole. "Cain," the promise of a Titanic birth, and "Kubla Khan," a literal dream of oriental glory, withered in the blight of an unexecuting will. But how exquisite in their completeness are the "Hymn to Mont Blanc" (though, by the bye, this is one of the accused pieces), "Love," the "Odes," and many lesser jewels! He often expands his genius on trifles; and, even in his greater efforts, it is to be regretted that his idealism has placed much of his poetry beyond popular relish or sympathy. His dramatic pieces, like most modern efforts of this class, exhibit rather scenery, poetry, and sentiment, than character; but the surviving fragments of this dramatic criticism show that they need only completeness to be sufficient alone for his immortality.

The best tribute to Coleridge's genius consists in its admiration—nay, imitation—by the highest minds among his contemporaries, Byron and Scott, while all must perceive that his melody and his phraseology still murmur in the finest strains that emanate from the present age.

**COLEERON River**, the northern branch of the Cavery, from which it diverges below the island of Seringhama, near Trichinopoli, in Southern India, and falls into the sea at Devicotta, in Lat. 11° 22', Long. 79° 32', after a course of about 92 miles. The entrance of the river is difficult and dangerous of access from a bank called Coleeron Shoal, which stretches 4 or 5 miles to the S.E. An extensive system of canal irrigation, in connection with the waters of this river, has been established by the local government.