embarrassment, the yeasty state of his religious and political ideas,
and impatience or despondency over his love-affair with Mary Evans,
combined to precipitate his flight; what we know is that he ran away
from Cambridge and in December, 1793, enlisted as a dragoon in the
army.

Coleridge had hardly taken the step before he repented of it. His
letters to his brother George, who with other friends bestirred himself
for Coleridge's release as soon as his whereabouts was discovered, are
rather distressing in their self-abasement. The efforts of his friends
were successful and in April he returned to the University, where a
public admonition was the extent of his punishment, and he continued in
receipt of his Christ's Hospital exhibition.

But Coleridge's college days were practically over. He was now nearly
twenty-two years old, and the revolutionary unrest which had doubtless
contributed to his first escapade soon resulted in the formation of
schemes that took him away from Cambridge for good and all. In June,
1794, he made a visit to an old schoolfellow at Oxford. Here he met
Robert Southey of Balliol College. A friendship sprang up between them
out of which, before the end of the summer, grew the Utopian scheme of
Pantisocracy. A company of gentlemen and ladies were to emigrate to
America, take up lands in the Susquehanna valley, and there establish an
ideal community in which all should bear rule equally and find happiness
in a life of justice, labor, and love. The education of the young in the
principles of ideal humanity was an important part of the scheme. We are
reminded of the Brook Farm experiment in New England a generation later,
which bears a daughter's likeness to Pantisocracy, the chief difference
being that the New England enthusiasts were mature men and women and
really put the idea into practice, whereas the Pantisocrats were for the