[Illustration: ST. OSWALD'S CHURCH, GRASMERE Wordsworth's body was buried in the churchyard See _The Excursion_, Book V] This great work was left unfinished, and one may say of it, as of Spenser's _Faery Queen_, that it is better so. Like other poets of venerable years Wordsworth wrote many verses that were better left in the inkpot; and it is a pity, in dealing with so beautiful and necessary a thing as poetry, that one should ever reach the point of saying, sadly but truthfully, "Enough is too much." * * * * * COLERIDGE AND SOUTHEY The story of these two men is a commentary on the uncertainties of literary fortune. Both won greater reward and reputation than fell to the lot of Wordsworth; but while the fame of the latter poet mounts steadily with the years, the former have become, as it were, footnotes to the great contemporary with whom they were associated, under the name of "Lake Poets," for half a glorious century. [Illustration: SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE] SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834). The tragedy _Remorse_, which Coleridge wrote, is as nothing compared with the tragedy of his own life. He was a man of superb natural gifts, of vast literary culture, to whose genius the writers of that age--Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Shelley, Landor, Southey--nearly all bear witness. He might well have been a great poet, or critic, or philosopher, or teacher; but he lacked the will power to direct his gifts to any definite end. His irresolution became pitiful weakness when he began to indulge in the drug habit, which soon made a slave of him. Thereafter he impressed all who met him with a sense of loss and inexpressible sorrow. [Sidenote: LIFE OF COLERIDGE] Coleridge began to read at three years of age; at five he had gone through the Bible and the Arabian Nights; at thirty he was perhaps the most widely read man of his generation in the fields of literature and philosophy. He was a student in a famous charity school in London when he met Charles Lamb, who records his memories of the boy and the place in his charming essay of "Christ's Hospital." At college he was one of a band of enthusiasts inspired by the French Revolution, and with Southey he formed a plan to establish in America a world-reforming Pantisocracy, or communistic settlement, where all should be brothers and equals, and where a little manual work was to be tempered by much play, poetry and culture. Europeans had queer ideas of America in those days. This beautiful plan failed, because the reformers did not have money enough to cross the ocean and stake out their Paradise. [Illustration: THE COLERIDGE COTTAGE, NETHER STOWEY, IN SOMERSETSHIRE]