Early Life
Coleridge was born at Greta Hall, Keswick. Here, after 1803, the Coleridges, Robert Southey and his wife (Mrs. Coleridge's sister), and Mrs. Lovell (another sister), widow of Robert Lovell, the Quaker poet, all lived together; but Coleridge was often away from home; and Uncle Southey was a paterfamilias. The Wordsworths at Grasmere were their neighbors.
Wordsworth, in his poem, the Triad, has left us a description, or poetical glorification, as Sara Coleridge calls it, of the three girls: his own daughter Dora, Edith Southey and Sara Coleridge, the last of the three, though eldest born. Greta Hall was Sara Coleridge's home until her marriage; and the little Lake colony seems to have been her only school. Guided by Southey, and with his ample library at her command, she read by herself the chief Greek and Latin classics, and before she was twenty five had learnt in addition French, German, Italian and Spanish.
Read more about this topic: Sara Coleridge
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“What’s terrible is that there’s nothing terrible, that the very essence of life is petty, uninteresting, and degradingly trite.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)