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6 THE BLUE-COAT BOY [1772rnemory
and understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness,
I was flattered and wondered at by all the old women. And so I became
very vain, and despised most of the boys that were at all near my own
age, and before I was eight years old I was a character. Sensibility, imagination,
vanity, sloth, and feelings of deep and bitter contempt for all
who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent
and manifest. •
Thus our present colours our past. Coleridge was even
capable of regarding himself as a philosopher from the egg
onwards. When his father explained to him the motions of
the heavenly bodies at the age of 8, he listened without
wonder or incredulity.
For from my early reading of fairy tales and genii, etc., etc., my mind •
had been habituated to the Vast, and I never regarded my senses in any
way as the criteria of my belief. I regulated all my creeds by my conceptions,
not by my sight, even at that age.
Children, he thought, should be brought up on romance.
'I know no other way of giving the mind a love of the Great
and the Whole/ 1 One may comment that the Arabian Nights
were also the favourite early reading of John Stuart Mill.
Incidents of Coleridge's childhood may have helped to
sow the seeds of that ill health which pursued him to the
end of his life. He had a putrid fever at the age of 6, and
later, after a quarrel with Frank, ran into the fields beside
the Otter, and lay asleep there in a stormy night, until he
was found, wet through, on the brink of the river in the
morning. A long period of intermittent ague followed.
Long after, when a calf bellowed in the night at Keswick,
he recalled the same sound as it came across those river
fields. 2 One other reminiscence, perhaps his earliest, is also
auditory, for at Ottery the future poet heard—
Our old Musician, blind and grey,
(Whom stretching from my nurse's arms I kissed,)
His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play. 3
Coleridge's father died suddenly in October 1781. Sir
Francis Buller offered to provide for the boy's future, and
obtained a nomination for him to Christ's Hospital from one
1 C. 3, 4; Gillman, 10; Fr. i. 197.
2 C. 3, 4; Gillman, 10; A.P. 29. 3 P.W. 324.