What is it, then, they do? I will tell you. They sit upon the rocks, waiting for the next mealtime and refusing (rightly) to support the miserable creatures who, calling themselves “pierrots,” infest the front. In the exiguous public gardens old ladies of both sexes knit impossible and useless articles or pretend to read the newspapers, and wonder why they ever came to the place. The paradoxical tragedy of Clevedon is that there is at once too little and too much of it: too little sea-front, and a great deal too much of the town in these later times built beside it; but the place must indeed have been delightful in 1795, at the time when Samuel Taylor Coleridge brought his bride here from Bristol, where they had been married, in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe. He was twenty-three, and a visionary immersed in German metaphysics and the Kantean philosophy; and had but recently been bought out of the 15th Light Dragoons, in which in a moment of despair and starvation, he had enlisted. Four months of military duties untempered with glory, but strongly savoured with riding-lessons and stable-fatigue, did not make him a more practical man; and he remained in all the sixty-two years that made up his span of life, although the most gifted of all the clever Coleridge family, an amiable dreamer. The dreams in which he and Southey and other friends were at this time immersed were concerned with a fantastic kind of Socialism they were pleased to style a “Pantisocracy,” in which ideal state all property was to be held in common, and all spare time was to be occupied with literature; a truly terrible prospect! This ideal community was to be established in North America, on the Susquehanna river, there to live a life of plain living and high thinking, punctuated with washing up the domestic dishes, weeding the potato-patch, and propagating a new generation of prigs. But money was needed for the starting of this pretty and pedantic scheme, and because “Pantisocracy” (Heavens! what a name!) did not appeal, and was never likely to appeal, to any one who was master of any honest coin of the realm, it remained a vision. It failed for want of money; and, human nature being what it is, it would still have failed disastrously had funds been provided. So our Pantisocrats remained in England; “Myrtle Cottage,” Clevedon, remaining for a little while the address of the Coleridges, until they removed to Nether Stowey. We may fairly suppose that here this wayward genius, a brilliant talker, a poet of gorgeous ideas and noble language, but a man constitutionally infirm of purpose, and made yet more inconstant by deep reading of mystical German philosophy that led to mental blind alleys, lived the happiest time of his life. We obtain an early first glimpse of him—the second day after arrival—in his letter to Cottle, the amiable and helpful bookseller of Bristol, who greatly befriended Coleridge and Southey when they needed friendship most: