When Coleridge left the University he had entered his twenty-third year; he had rather more than forty before him, but, as the two preceding years had been, so were the most of those that followed. Trouble, largely if not altogether of his own making, anxiety, comparative poverty, ill-health, these were the shadows that darkened his days. For him life was a problem with which he could not grapple; although he had a giant's strength he did not know how to use it. He was master of a rare and exquisite gift, but it did not avail him. Other men, with a tithe of his talent and the full capacity for living a well-ordered life, could earn a comfortable competence, acquire honour and command respect, while Coleridge, who was in so many respects their master, drifted across the wide waters of life, a ship without a rudder. We need not criticise, we can better pity a man who, greatly gifted, could not raise his head among his contemporaries. Had some stern disciplinarian stood behind him at Cambridge he might have achieved distinction; had he married a strong resolute woman she might have taught him regular industry and self-respect. But in all the important actions of his life the mood of the moment was the deciding factor, so that, despite the number of his friends, there was none to help. Coleridge was almost a genius, and quite a law to himself. Such happiness as came to him was found chiefly in intercourse with kindred spirits, in grappling with metaphysical problems, in refuting the current errors of philosophy, and above all in the kindness and generosity of friends. Woe to the man who accepts help from others! Once he has done this he stands for ever on a lower plane, his life is no longer his own, he can no longer say, "I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul." It was the misfortune of Coleridge to receive assistance in those critical hours when a man must stand alone, though it be but in a garret with no more food and clothing than will serve for the necessities of life. There are few brilliant exceptions to the sweeping rule that forbids self-respecting men to receive doles. Horace and Virgil are notable among them, but the rule stands, even while we remember that both Martial and Juvenal declared that the protection of prince or patron offers the only chance to poetry. With Coleridge there was less excuse than the poet may claim, for he could always command a living wage in journalism. The trouble with him was not to get money for his work, but to give work in return for other people's money.

From Cambridge the poet drifted to London, journalism, and the delightful company of Charles Lamb. He wrote sonnets for the Morning Chronicle, and took his glass and pipe with Elia in long-forgotten taverns until Southey hunted him up and carried him back to Bristol and Sarah Fricker, to Pantisocracy and lecturing and the company of Burnett, with whom both Coleridge and Southey lived in College Street. In 1796 Cottle, the Bristol publisher, paid Coleridge thirty guineas for poems, including the "Monody on the Death of Chatterton" and "Religious Musings." Southey lost faith in Pantisocracy and went to live with his mother. Coleridge lost faith in Southey, the friends quarrelled, and for some time were not on speaking or writing terms. Cottle, who had a sure eye for promising work, offered to buy all the verse Coleridge could write at the price of one and a half guineas per hundred lines, and on the strength of this, Coleridge married Sarah Fricker in October 1795, and settled in a little cottage at Clevedon near Bristol, in company with Burnett and another of Sarah's sisters. The men shared in the labour of the house, but it was too far from town to serve for purposes of work in days when the circulating library was still unknown, and, early in their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Coleridge moved to Redcliffe Hill. There Coleridge decided to start a paper called The Watchman, to be published on every eighth day, and he has left on record an account of his northern pilgrimage in search of subscribers. He found enough to justify publication; the paper lived to reach its tenth number, when it departed from life, leaving its editor-proprietor stranded, though his Poems on Various Subjects, with additions by Charles Lamb, Robert Southey, and Mr. Favell, had been published in March by Cottle, and had been favourably received. Thomas Poole, as good a friend as ever poet had, came to the rescue with forty pounds, and Coleridge spent a happy fortnight at Nether Stowey; with him, as soon as a trouble was over it could be forgotten. But something had to be done; negotiations for the post of co-editor of the Morning Chronicle were opened, and fell through. Following this came another plan, to educate the children of a wealthy Derbyshire lady, who changed her mind at the eleventh hour, giving the poet £95, and his wife a welcome gift of baby linen instead. In the meantime the prodigal son had visited Ottery St. Mary and been reconciled to his family. Proposals to establish a school in Derby came to nothing, and there is matter for regret here, for the poet would have made an admirable schoolmaster. In September his responsibilities were increased by the arrival of David Hartley Coleridge, born while the poet was on a visit to the Lloyds. Charles Lloyd, an epilept, was anxious to live with him, and Coleridge wished to rent a house near Nether Stowey that he might be near his friend Poole. After much search a cottage was found.

By this time, the poet had begun to suffer from severe neuralgia, and had started to dose himself with laudanum for its cure. With his usual optimism in hours of change, the future was clear to him. "My farm will be a garden of an acre and a half," he writes to "Citizen" Thelwall, "in which I intend to raise vegetables and corn for my wife, and feed a couple of grunting and snouted cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature, and by reviews in the Monthly Magazine and other shilling scavengering, shall probably gain £40 a year—which economy and self-denial, gold beaters, shall hammer till it covers my annual expenses." Well might Lamb write—"What does your worship know about farming?" More than a hundred years have passed since Coleridge took the little cottage of which the garden met Poole's, but successive generations of literary men and poets have shared his strange belief that anybody can go on the land and make it yield its fruits in due season. That farming demands a strenuous apprenticeship and sound judgment, if it is not to fail altogether to yield any harvest save debt, that appreciation of country life does not carry knowledge with it, these are truths which the majority of men of letters decline to admit.

A second edition of his poems, with additions by Charles Lloyd as well as Lamb, produced twenty guineas from Cottle, and the poet settled to learn the rudiments of agriculture from Thomas Poole, and to train Charles Lloyd in the way he should go. Then he went on a visit to the Wordsworths, who were first at Racedown and later at Alfoxden House. An offer from Sheridan to consider a play for Drury Lane led to the writing of Osorio. Charles Lamb came to Nether Stowey, and so too did William and Dorothy Wordsworth and "Citizen" John Thelwall, with whom Coleridge kept up such a lively correspondence. This visit brought about the Wordsworths' departure from Alfoxden House, for the "Citizen," rather an undesirable person at best, was a political suspect, and a nervous government sent a spy down to Nether Stowey to find what company he kept. But in spite of "those gold beaters, economy and self-denial," the poet's poor exchequer was by no means equal to the demands made upon it by his unsettled mode of living. He received a fresh subscription from friends, urged to contribute by Thomas Poole, and declared that this would be the last subsidy he would be free to accept. Doubtless he thought so; at no period of his life had Coleridge the slightest idea of the value of money, the expense of living, or the probable fate of his own best intentions. One traces in him a faint likeness to Wilkins Micawber. With the later months of 1797, he visited Bowles, whose sonnets had appealed so greatly to him, and learned that Sheridan had rejected Osorio. Relations with Charles Lloyd no longer remained as they had been, and it may be that his contribution to the family exchequer at Nether Stowey was not maintained. But for all the troubles and trials of the year it is a notable one in the annals of British poetry, for on November 13 Coleridge set out with William and Dorothy Wordsworth on a walking tour of which the expense was to be defrayed by a joint composition. Wordsworth for once was not equal to the task, and Coleridge began the poem by which he is best known, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." His own description of it as "inimitable" does not seem extravagant. Begun in the course of the memorable walk, it was finished in the following March, though there were further alterations as subsequent editions of collected poems appeared. The beginning of "Christabel" belongs apparently to 1797.

The opening of 1798 brought some good fortune in its train. Coleridge had been about to accept a call to the Unitarian Chapel at Shrewsbury, and had already given a taste of his quality in the pulpit, when Josiah and Thomas Wedgwood, sons of the famous potter, sought to keep him from burying his gifts. They understood that the need of cash rather than the claims of faith were responsible for his new departure. A present for his immediate needs the poet returned, and then came a remarkable letter from Josiah Wedgwood offering in his own and his brother's name to pay Coleridge £150 a year, the amount of his promised stipend from the Chapel, if he would turn from the work of the preacher and devote himself to poetry and philosophy. No further conditions were attached to this munificent offer, which was to last for life and to be independent of everything but the wreck of the brothers' fortunes. Coleridge was staying with William Hazlitt, at the house of the latter's father near Shrewsbury, when the letter from Josiah Wedgwood was received, and the essayist has set down the story in one of his papers. The poet accepted the offer, a very fortunate one, considering the ever-changing nature of his faith, and Unitarianism found some other advocate. About the same time came an invitation from the Morning Post, which would have brought in another fifty pounds a year, so that, had Coleridge been able to take the fullest advantage of his opportunities, financial anxieties might have come to an end. Doubtless his good fortune inspired him to some fine efforts in 1798, but he was nervous and hyper-sensitive, his quarrel with Charles Lloyd had affected his spirits, he retired to a Devonshire farm-house to indulge in seclusion and opium and write the fragmentary "Kubla Khan." Through Charles Lloyd came a misunderstanding, happily brief, with Charles Lamb. Other happenings in 1798 were the birth of a second son, the short-lived Berkeley Coleridge; the publication, anonymously, of Lyrical Ballads with a few other Poems, joint effort of Wordsworth and Coleridge; and the trip with William and Mary Wordsworth and a friend from Stowey (John Chester by name) to Germany, a journey described in part by Coleridge in Satyrane's Letters.

Coleridge left the Wordsworths after a brief stay, and went to Ratzburg with Chester, while the brother and sister went to Goslar. From Ratzburg, Coleridge went to GÖttingen, where he matriculated and collected material for a Life of Lessing. He seems to have worked hard in Germany, where his taste for abstruse metaphysical speculation was greatly strengthened.

Before he left GÖttingen for London, he had learned the sad news of the death of his youngest child, and with the return to the metropolis, we come to another chapter in the poet's life. It will be seen that the generosity of the brothers Wedgwood had stimulated him to an increased effort, though at the moment when he might have pulled himself together and was honestly trying to do so, the opium habit began to hold him. The current of his life could not run smoothly; he at least was "born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward." The best that can be said is that the visit to Germany, and the brief period of honest study, did much to develop the poet's mind, opening to it unknown fields of German thought, and filling him with dreams of great works that were to unite German and British philosophers. Needless to say that, though mountains were expected to arise, little more than a molehill was forthcoming.