Point de contraintes fausses! Mais que pour marcher droit Tu chausses, Muse, un cothurne étroit!" But, however much there is to be said against Wordsworth's poetics, or "prosaics," as they might more correctly be called--against theories which were at first accepted as synonymous with the "Fair is foul, and foul is fair" of the witches in Macbeth--they are in the highest degree interesting to the student of literature to-day as an accurate and unambiguous expression of the first literary extreme to which English Naturalism went. [1] R. S. Mackenzie: _Life of Dickens_, p. 243. [2] Masson: _Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and other Essays_. [3] Johannes Ewald, a Danish poet.--Transcriber's note. [4] Oh! many are the poets that are sown By nature! men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the faculty divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse. --_Excursion_: Book I. VII NATURALISTIC ROMANTICISM We have for a moment lost sight of Coleridge. When Wordsworth and he divided the new kinds of poetry between them, there fell to his share, as the reader will remember, a task which was the exact opposite of Wordsworth's, namely, the treating of supernatural subjects in a natural manner. He fulfilled it in his contributions to the volume published under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_, and indeed in the greater proportion of the little collection of poems which entitles him to rank high among English poets. [Illustration: S. T. COLERIDGE] Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a country boy, the son of a Devonshire clergyman. He was born in October 1772. From 1782 to 1790 he was at school in London. It was during those school-days, spent at Christ's Hospital, that his friendship with another English Romanticist, his warm admirer, Charles Lamb, was formed. From 1791 to 1793 he studied at Cambridge. He had neither means nor prospects, and in a fit of despair, occasioned either by his debts or by an unhappy love affair, he suddenly enlisted in the 15th Regiment of Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas Titus Cumberback.[1] It certainly does not seem to have been ambition (as in the case of Johannes Ewald a few years earlier) which prompted him to try his fortune as a soldier, but simply want of any other means of subsistence. He was only four months a dragoon. On the stable wall underneath his saddle, he one day scribbled the Latin lament:-- "Eheu quam infortuni miserrimum est fuisse felicem!"