Quote of the Day (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on Who ‘Prayeth Best’)

“He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.”--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798)

The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on this date in 1772 in Devonshire, England. He had gone to Jesus College at the University of Cambridge intending to follow his father into the ministry of the Church of England, but while in school became fascinated by the Unitarian Church, liberalism and poetry. His religious beliefs became integrated into a larger philosophical system in which he suggested that a concern for the natural world was necessary for human salvation—a belief system that probably has the most adherents now, two centuries since the height of his career as poet and critic.