Commenting on the _Conciones ad Populum_
many years afterwards, and invoking them as witnesses to his political
consistency as an author, Coleridge remarked that with the exception of
"two or three pages involving the doctrine of philosophical necessity
and Unitarianism," he saw little or nothing in these outbursts of his
youthful zeal to retract, and, with the exception of "some flame-
coloured epithets" applied to persons, as to Mr. Pitt and others, "or
rather to personifications"--for such, he says, they really were to
him--as little to regret.
We now, however, arrive at an event, important in the life of every
man, and which influenced that of Coleridge to an extent not the less
certainly extraordinary because difficult, if not impossible, to define
with exactitude. On the 4th of October 1795 Coleridge was married at
St. Mary Redcliffe Church, Bristol, to Sarah (or as he preferred to
spell it Sara) Fricker, and withdrew for a time from the eager
intellectual life of a political lecturer to the contemplative quiet
appropriate to the honeymoon of a poet, spent in a sequestered cottage
amid beautiful scenery, and within sound of the sea. No wonder that
among such surroundings, and with such belongings, the honeymoon should
have extended from one month to three, and indeed that Coleridge should
have waited till his youthful yearnings for a life of action, and
perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem
of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the
necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and
cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world.
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