poems published under his own name. These, however, as a juvenile and immature collection, made expressly with a view to pecuniary profit, and therefore courting expansion at any cost of critical discretion, had in general greatly disappointed me.[39] [33] Published in 1798.--M. [34] See _ante_, p. 61.--M. [35] Published in 1800.--M. [36] The first edition of Southey's epic was published in 1796, the second in 1798, both at Bristol.--M. [37] Published, with other political pieces, in 1798, after having appeared in the _Morning Post_ newspaper.--M. [38] _English Anthology_ for 1799-1800, in 2 vols., published at Bristol, and edited by Southey.--M. [39] The first edition, entitled _Poems on Various Subjects, by S. T. Coleridge, late of Jesus College, Cambridge_, was published at Bristol in 1796; the second at London in 1797; the third at London in 1803.--M. Meantime, it had crowned the interest which to me invested his name, that about the year 1804 or 1805 I had been informed by a gentleman from the English Lakes, who knew him as a neighbour, that he had for some time applied his whole mind to metaphysics and psychology--which happened to be my own absorbing pursuit. From 1803 to 1808, I was a student at Oxford; and, on the first occasion when I could conveniently have sought for a personal knowledge of one whom I contemplated with so much admiration, I was met by a painful assurance that he had quitted England, and was then residing at Malta, in the quality of secretary to the Governor. I began to inquire about the best route to Malta; but, as any route at that time promised an inside place in a French prison, I reconciled myself to waiting; and at last, happening to visit the Bristol Hotwells in the summer of 1807, I had the pleasure to hear that Coleridge was not only once more upon English ground, but within forty and odd miles of my own station. In that same hour I bent my way to the south; and, before evening, reaching a ferry on the river Bridgewater, at a village called, I think, Stogursey (_i.e._, Stoke de Courcy, by way of distinction from some other Stoke), I crossed it, and a few miles farther attained my object--viz., the little town of Nether Stowey, amongst the Quantock Hills. Here I had been assured that I should find Mr. Coleridge, at the house of his old friend Mr. Poole. On presenting myself, however, to that gentleman, I found that Coleridge was absent at Lord Egmont's, an elder brother (by the father's side) of Mr. Perceval, the Prime Minister, assassinated five years later; and, as it was doubtful whether he might not then be on the wing to another friend's in the town of Bridgewater, I consented willingly, until his motions should be ascertained, to stay a day or two with this Mr. Poole--a man on his own account well deserving a separate notice; for, as Coleridge afterwards remarked to me, he was almost an ideal model for a useful member of Parliament.[40] I found him a