Thank Heaven! it was not the age for
getting up prodigies; but at twelve or fourteen I should have made as
pretty a juvenile prodigy as was ever emasculated and ruined by fond and
idle wonderment. Thank Heaven! I was flogged instead of being flattered.
However, as I climbed up the school, my lot was somewhat alleviated."
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE AND PANTISOCRACY
(1791 to 1795)
Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy
fancies, with Hope like a fiery column before thee--the dark pillar
not yet turned--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--Logician, Metaphysician,
Bard!--
S. T. Coleridge entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of
February, 1791. [He did not go into residence till October 1791.]
The poems he wrote about this time and during his first vacation at
College are rather conventional, and give few indications of his future
deft handling of verse. His "Mathematical Problem" sent to his brother
George, is a piece of droll nonsense, but the letter accompanying it is
much better than the verse. It reads as follows:
LETTER 6. TO GEORGE COLERIDGE, WITH A POEM ENTITLED "A MATHEMATICAL
PROBLEM"
Dear Brother,
I have often been surprised that Mathematics, the quintessence of Truth,
should have found admirers so few and so languid. Frequent consideration
and minute scrutiny have at length unravelled the cause; viz.
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