studious," and not unambitious of academical honours--within a few
months of his entering at Jesus he won the Browne Gold Medal for a
Greek Ode on the Slave Trade [3]--his reading, his friend admits, was
"desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake
of exercise, but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in
conversation, and for the sake of this his room was a constant
rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them
loungers, for they did not call to kill time but to enjoy it." From the
same record we gather that Coleridge's interest in current politics was
already keen, and that he was an eager reader, not only of Burke's
famous contributions thereto, but even a devourer of all the pamphlets
which swarmed during that agitated period from the press. The desultory
student, however, did not altogether intermit his academical studies.
In 1793 he competed for another Greek verse prize, this time
unsuccessfully. He afterwards described his ode _On Astronomy_ as
"the finest Greek poem I ever wrote;" [4] but, whatever may have been
its merits from the point of view of scholarship, the English
translation of it, made eight years after by Southey (in which form
alone it now exists), seems hardly to establish its title to the
peculiar merit claimed by its author for his earlier effort. The long
vacation of this year, spent by him in Devonshire, is also interesting
as having given birth to one of the most characteristic of the
_Juvenile Poems,_ the _Songs of the Pixies_, and the closing
months of 1793 were marked by the most singular episode in the poet's
earlier career.

It is now perhaps impossible to ascertain whether the cause of this
strange adventure of Coleridge's was, "chagrin at his disappointment in
a love affair" or "a fit of dejection and despondency caused by some
debts not amounting to a hundred pounds;" but, actuated by some impulse