irresistible spell as to estrange them for a while from poetry
altogether. That this was the experience of Coleridge we have his own
words to show. His son and biographer, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, has
a little antedated the poet's stages of development in stating that
when his father was sent to Christ's Hospital in his eleventh year he
was "already a poet, and yet more characteristically a metaphysician."
A poet, yes, and a precocious scholar perhaps to boot, but a
metaphysician, no; for the "delightful sketch of him by his friend and
schoolfellow Charles Lamb" was pretty evidently taken not at "this
period" of his life but some years later. Coleridge's own account of
the matter in the _Biographia Literaria_ is clear. [1] "At a very
premature age, even before my fifteenth year," he says, "I had
bewildered myself in metaphysics and in theological controversy.
Nothing else pleased me. History and particular facts lost all interest
in my mind. Poetry (though for a schoolboy of that age I was above par
in English versification, and had already produced two or three
compositions which I may venture to say 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
romance, became insipid to me." He goes on to describe how highly
delighted he was if, during his friendless wanderings on leave-days,
"any passenger, especially if he were dressed in black," would enter
with him into a conversation, which he soon found the means of
directing to his favourite subject of "providence, foreknowledge, will,
and fate; fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute." Undoubtedly it
is to this period that one should refer Lamb's well-known description
of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metaphysician, Bard."

"How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still,
entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between