176 A LITERARY PILGRIM IN ENGLAND
used to turn his fond retrospection into verses. He wrote a sonnet to the River Otter,
"Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!"
recalling the game of ducks-and-drakes on it, the plank bridge, the sandy bed, the willows which would always reappear to him if he shut his eyes in the sun, and wake a sigh:
"Ah! that once more I were a careless child!"
In "An Autumnal Evening" he says that,
"Tost by storms along life's wild'ring way,
Mine eye reverted views that cloudless day,
When by my native brook I wont to rove
While hope with kisses nurs'd the infant love,"
and again he hails the "Dear native brook!" and "Scenes of my hope." The Otter's "sleep-persuading stream" is mentioned again in "Songs of the Pixies."
What we know of Coleridge at Ottery is not much. He spent all his early years there, both play hours and school hours, for he attended the grammar-school, where his father was master. According to his account, he took no pleasure in boyish sports, but read incessantly. "I used to lie by the wall and mope," he said, "and my spirits used to come upon me suddenly, and in a flood; and I then was accustomed to run up and down the churchyard and act over again all I had been reading, on the docks and the nettles and the rank grass." Earlier than that, in his nurse's arms, he had heard an "old musician, blind and grey,"
"His Scottish tunes and warlike marches play,"
