most part collegians and never got beyond the stage of talking and
writing about their plans. The scheme was further elaborated at Bristol,
where Coleridge, returning from a vacation tour in Wales, again met
Southey, and at Bath, the home of Southey and of Southey's betrothed and
her sister, Edith and Sarah Fricker--"two sisters, milliners of Bath,"
as Byron contemptuously called them.

To the other sister, Sarah, Coleridge rather precipitately engaged
himself. His love for Mary Evans was not dead, but he seems to have
despaired of winning her and to have determined, by uniting himself
domestically with Southey and his friends, to make retreat from their
communistic scheme impossible. A few weeks later he is back at
Cambridge, tortured apparently between his old love and his new
engagement. Mary Evans has written to him deploring his wild notions and
the mad plan of Pantisocracy, yet confident that he has "too much
sensibility to be an infidel." Southey has reproved him rather sharply
for failing to write to his betrothed at Bath. Our next glimpse of him
is at London, discussing poetry and philosophy with Lamb at the
"Salutation and Cat" tavern and perhaps trying to get a sight of Mary
Evans. In December he is again at Bristol, in lively correspondence with
Southey about democracy, Pantisocracy, and poetry, but at the same time
he addresses a last appeal to Miss Evans. Her answer is kind, but final;
that chapter is closed, and Coleridge writes to Southey that he will "do
his duty," by which he means apparently that he will be faithful to
Pantisocracy and marry Sarah Fricker.

The Pantisocracy scheme could not in the nature of things be long-lived.
As a matter of fact it lasted little more than a year, ending in a
rupture between the two leading spirits just when they became
brothers-in-law. Coleridge spent the summer of 1795 in Bristol in