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26 CAMBRIDGE [1791to
have abandoned, through his example, the sexual irregularities
of which he had always been ashamed. 1 It may have
been in Southey's mind, rather than in Coleridge's, that the
germ of the scheme which came to be known as Pantisocracy
originated. In 1793 he had written to friends of the
attraction he found in the poet Cowley's dream of retiring
with books to a cottage in America, and there seeking the
happiness in solitude which he could not find in society. 2
My asylum there would be sought for different reasons (and no prospect
in life gives me half the pleasure this visionary one affords). I
should be pleased to reside in a country where man's abilities would
ensure respect; where society was upon a proper footing, and man was
considered as more valuable than money; and where I could till the
earth, and provide by honest industry the meat which my wife would
dress with pleasing care—redeunt spectacula mane—reason comes with
the end of the paper.
In similar vein he must have spoken to Coleridge, and
Coleridge, who never knew the difference between a dream
and a way of life, jumped at the hint. It could be done and
should be done. He had already read William Godwin's
Political Justice, published the year before, in which, amongst
so much that is merely negative, the idea of human perfectibility
is the one constructive feature. In America, by a
small society, combining, at least in the second generation,
'the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge
and genuine refinements of European culture'—here, surely,
the idea could be tried out, as in a laboratory experiment. 3
It was, no doubt, also Coleridge's classical imagination that
invented the names Pantisocracy and Aspheterism to christen
the plan. Robert Allen and a Balliol friend of Southey,
George Burnett, would surely join in. As for funds, Coleridge's
volume of translations and a poem entitled Joan of
Arc,uipon which Southey was engaged, would supply them. 4
Having discussed this, Coleridge set off with Hucks for
his Welsh tour, leaving Southey to look for further recruits.
He found one in Robert Lovell, a young poet on the point
of marriage with Mary Fricker, one of the five daughters
1 B.L. i. 49; Gillman, 64.
2 Southey (L.), i. 191, 195, 197; cf. Cowley, Preface to Poems (1656).
3 P.W. 86; Fr. ii. 29. 4 Southey (L.), i. 210, 213, 221; (W.), li. 194; Rem. 404.