the strength and subtlety of the understanding without awakening the
feelings of the heart, there was a long and blessed interval, during
which my natural faculties were allowed to expand and my original
tendencies to develop themselves--my fancy, and the love of nature, and
the sense of beauty in forms and sounds." This "long and blessed
interval" endured, as we shall see, for some eleven or twelve years.

His own account of his seduction from the paths of poetry by the wiles
of philosophy is that physiology acted as the go-between. His brother
Luke had come up to London to walk the hospitals, and young Samuel's
insatiable intellectual curiosity immediately inspired him with a
desire to share his brother's pursuit. "Every Saturday I could make or
obtain leave, to the London Hospital trudged I. O! the bliss if I was
permitted to hold the plaisters or attend the dressings.... I became
wild to be apprenticed to a surgeon; English, Latin, yea, Greek books
of medicine read I incessantly. Blanchard's _Latin Medical
Dictionary_ I had nearly by heart. Briefly, it was a wild dream,
which, gradually blending with, gradually gave way to, a rage for
metaphysics occasioned by the essays on Liberty and Necessity in Cato's
_Letters_, and more by theology." [2] At the appointed hour,
however, Bowles the emancipator came, as has been said, to his relief,
and having opportunely fallen in love with the eldest daughter of a
widow lady of whose son he had been the patron and protector at school,
we may easily imagine that his liberation from the spell of metaphysics
was complete. "From this time," he says, "to my nineteenth year, when I
quitted school for Jesus, Cambridge, was the era of poetry and love."

Of Coleridge's university days we know less; but the account of his
schoolfellow, Charles Le Grice, accords, so far as it goes, with what
would have been anticipated from the poet's school life. Although "very