Coleridge and Science

I've just begun Richard Holmes' latest work, The Age of Wonder, and it's as good as everyone says it is. The book is a history of late 18th century romantic science, filled with digressions into hot air balloons, Tahitian beaches and the "near suicidal" experiments of Humphry Davy.

One of the subplots of the book is the entanglement of science, religion and poetry. For these madcap empiricists, there was no clear line separating art from experiment, or God from nature.

Consider the career of