Early life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge lost to Virtue". In the letter, Coleridge attacks Southey for causing the divide between the two of them and for pursuing money instead of their beliefs. Coleridge's and Southey's relationship dissolved, and Coleridge was without a close friend. However, he met William Wordsworth, a fellow poet, in September 1795 and would eventually become close with him. Their relationship did not yet start, and in January 1796 Coleridge was travelling to find subscribers for a proposed political magazine called "The Watchman". During this time, he met with Erasmus Darwin and discussed both politics and religion; Darwin's atheism bothered Coleridge but he
The White Doe of Rylstone the reviewers were at best lukewarm. The "Eclectic Review" did concede that "where he comes in contact with the ordinary sympathies of human nature, no living poet leaves so strongly the impression of a master genius", but Francis Jeffrey of the "Edinburgh Review", a long-time foe of the Lake Poets, thought it had "the merit of being the very worst poem we ever saw imprinted in a quarto volume". Coleridge, by then in a state of uneasy reconciliation with Wordsworth, quoted a passage from "The White Doe" in his "Biographia Literaria", praising its beauty and imaginative power. John Ruskin, in