Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, philosopher, literary critic and talker, was born in 1772 at his father's Devonshire vicarage of Ottery St Mary. Schooled at Christ's Hospital, to which he was sent at the age of 9, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1791. There he soon acquired an ardent sympathy with the principles of both the French Revolution and William Godwin's philosophy, an application of which latter, in the form of a ‘Pantisocracy’, he planned, along with Robert Southey, to realize on the banks of the Susquehannah. But Coleridge was as constitutionally impractical as his republicanism was shallow and the venture remained a dream. The great event of his life was his meeting, in 1795, with Wordsworth—he meantime had left Cambridge without taking a degree—and with the poet, whose genius he at once hailed, he formed an intimate friendship destined to spur both men to their finest poetic efforts. Lyrical Ballads, a joint production to which Coleridge contributed ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, appeared in 1798, the two authors, accompanied by Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, setting off on a visit to Germany on the very eve of its publication. But Coleridge, the husband now of Southey's sister-in-law, had also met and become warmly attached to Wordsworth's own future sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson. Their relationship observed the strictest propriety—Coleridge's belief in the indissolubility of marriage was entirely sincere—but regrets on the poet's side were deep and lasting. Emotional frustration combined with the physical pain—evidently rheumatic—to which he was continually subject turned him to opium and he became addicted.