"Away, my soul, away!
I, unpartaking of the evil thing,
With daily prayer and daily toil
Soliciting for food my scanty soil,
Have wailed my country with a loud lament.
Now I recentre my immortal mind
In the deep Sabbath of meek self-content,
Cleansed from the vaporous passions which bedim
God's image, sister of the Seraphim."

If ever the consciousness of great powers and the assurance of a great
future inspired a youth with perfect and on the whole well-warranted
fearlessness of ridicule it has surely done so here.

Poetry alone, however, formed no sufficient outlet for Coleridge's
still fresh political enthusiasm--an enthusiasm which now became too
importunate to let him rest in his quiet Clevedon cottage. Was it
right, he cries in his lines of leave-taking to his home, that he
should dream away the entrusted hours "while his unnumbered brethren
toiled and bled"? The propaganda of Liberty was to be pushed forward;
the principles of Unitarianism, to which Coleridge had become a convert
at Cambridge, were to be preached. Is it too prosaic to add that what
poor Henri Murger calls the "chasse aux piece de cent sous" was in all
probability demanding peremptorily to be resumed?

Anyhow it so fell out that in the spring of the year 1796 Coleridge
took his first singular plunge into the unquiet waters of journalism,
instigated thereto by "sundry philanthropists and anti-polemists,"
whose names he does not record, but among whom we may conjecturally
place Mr. Thomas Poole of Stowey, with whom he had formed what was