De Quincey's Collected Writings Author:DAVID MASSON General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1889 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE1 It was, I think, in the month of August, but certainly in the summer season, and certainly in the year 1807, that I first saw this illustrious man. My knowledge of him as a man of most original genius began about the year 1799. A little before that time Wordsworth had published the first edition (in a single volume) of the " Lyrical Ballads,"2 and into this had been introduced Mr. Coleridge's poem of the "Ancient Mariner," as the contribution of an anonymous friend. It would be directing the reader's attention too much to myself if I were to linger upon this, the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind. Let me say, in one word, that, at a period when neither the one nor the other writer was valued by the public -- both having a long warfare to accomplish of contumely and ridicule before they 1 This chapter is composed of four articles contributed to Tait's Magazine under the title of "Samuel Taylor Coleridge : By the English Opium-Eater." They appeared, respectively, in the numbers of the Magazine for September, October, and November 1834, and January 1835. Three of these articles were revised by De Quincey, and thrown into one paper for Vol. II of the Collective Edition of his writings, published in 1854. The fourth article was not included in that paper ; but it is added to the reprint of the paper in the American Collective Edition of De Quincey, and is necessary to complete his sketch of Coleridge. It is therefore reproduced here. The reader will understand, accordingly, that as far as to p. 208 we follow De Quincey's revised text of three of his Coleri...« less