SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was born at Ottery Saint Mary, October 21, 1772. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and at Jesus College, Cambridge. At the age of twenty-two he left the University without having taken a degree. He was an intimate friend of Charles Lamb and Southey, and with the latter formed a wild scheme for the founding of a "Pantisocratic State" in America, which, however, was soon abandoned. His first book of poetry was published in 1794. In 1796 he and Charles Lamb published a volume of poems together. He soon afterwards became acquainted with Wordsworth, and in 1798 the two brought out their famous volume of _Lyrical Ballads_, containing some of Wordsworth's best pieces and Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." "Christabel," after lying in manuscript for several years, was published in 1816, three editions being issued within twelve months. Coleridge's chief poems were published in 1817 in a collection entitled _Sibylline Leaves_, so called, he says, "in allusion to the fragmentary and wildly scattered state in which they had long been suffered to remain." At about the same time he was received into the house of Mr. Gillman, a surgeon residing at Highgate, in order to be cured if possible of his excessive use of opium. Here he produced his more important prose works, _Aids to Reflection_, and _On the Constitution of Church and State_; and here he died, July 25, 1834. Coleridge was forever planning and designing,--beginning a work and leaving its completion until to-morrow--which never came. He devoted his attention only sparingly to poetry--and that chiefly during his youth. Later in life he was occupied with political, social, and religious questions. "He was a living Hamlet, full of the most splendid thoughts and the noblest purposes, but a most incompetent doer." "His mind," wrote Southey, "is a perpetual St. Vitus's dance--eternal activity without action." "Of Coleridge's best verses," says Swinburne, "I venture to affirm that the world has nothing like them, and can never have; that they are of the highest kind, and of their own. They are jewels of the diamond's price, flowers of the rose's rank, but unlike any rose or diamond known." "His best work is but little," says Stopford Brooke, "but of its kind it is perfect and unique. . . . All that he did excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold." =Other Poems to be Read:= The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni; Ode to France; Genevieve. REFERENCES: Swinburne's _Studies and Essays_; Shairp's _Studies in Poetry_; Carlyle's _Reminiscences_; Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_; De Quincey's _Essays_; _Coleridge_ (English Men of Letters), by H. D. Traill; Hazlitt's _English Poets_; Hunt's _Imagination and Fancy_; Chorley's _Authors of England_; Walter Pater's _Apprecia_. Percy Bysshe Shelley. TO A SKYLARK