exist in vigour, are not so easily discouraged, and it is probable that
they were naturally weaker and the meditative tendency stronger than
Coleridge in after-life imagined. But to continue: "I never played," he
proceeds, "except by myself, and then only acting over what I had been
reading or fancying, or half one, half the other" (a practice common
enough, it may be remarked, among boys of by no means morbidly
imaginative habit), "cutting down weeds and nettles with a stick, as
one of the seven champions of Christendom. Alas! I had all the
simplicity, all the docility of the little child, but none of the
child's habits. I never thought as a child--never had the language of a
child." So it fared with him during the period of his home instruction,
the first eight years of his life; and his father having, as scholar
and schoolmaster, no doubt noted the strange precocity of his youngest
son, appears to have devoted especial attention to his training. "In my
ninth year," he continues, "my most dear, most revered father died
suddenly. O that I might so pass away, if, like him, I were an
Israelite without guile. The image of my father, my revered, kind,
learned, simple-hearted father, is a religion to me."

Before he had attained his tenth year a presentation to Christ's
Hospital was obtained for him by that eminent judge Mr. Justice Buller,
a former pupil of his father's; and he was entered at the school on the
18th July 1782. His early bent towards poetry, though it displayed
itself in youthful verse of unusual merit, is a less uncommon and
arresting characteristic than his precocious speculative activity. Many
a raw boy "lisps in numbers, for the numbers come;" but few discourse
Alexandrian metaphysics at the same age, for the very good reason that
the metaphysics as a rule do not "come." And even among those youth
whom curiosity, or more often vanity, induces to dabble in such
studies, one would find few indeed over whom they have cast such an