The Early Intellectual Quest

Abstract

Even in childhood Coleridge was made to feel that he was a person of unusual gifts. Cut off from free intercourse with children of his own age, his position as the youngest child of an elderly clergyman gave him a special status in the Devonshire town where he spent his first years. As he remembered his childhood, ‘… because I could read & spell, & had, I may truly say, a memory & understanding forced into almost an unnatural ripeness, I was flattered & wondered at by all the old women. … and before I was eight years old I was a character — sensibility, imagination, sloth, & feelings of deep & bitter contempt for almost all who traversed the orbit of my understanding, were even then prominent & manifest.’¹