by himself, or telling stories. He had one close friend at the time, a boy named Robert Jameson, not a fellow student, to whom he afterwards addressed a series of sonnets. Somewhere along the way, Hartley conceived the idea of an underground stream of water that would eventually erupt onto the surface, creating a mighty river that would soon attract merchants and land developers, leading to the formation of a new island-continent. He called this imaginary paracosm Ejuxria, and laid out its geography and history with great care, explaining everything to Derwent as he went along. Derwent believed that Hartley kept up Ejuxria into adulthood. In his time at the school, Hartley was in constant contact with William Wordsworth and his family. He pursued his studies of English in Wordsworth's library at Allan Bank in Grasmere. His privilege of studying in the Wordsworth library was continued after the Wordsworth family moved to Rydal Mount. He went to Oxford in 1815, as a scholar of Merton College. From 1816 to 1820 he was in receipt of an exhibition funded from the bequest of James Wood administered by the Worshipful Company of Bowyers of the City of London. Derwent Coleridge made this comment about his brother's time at Oxford: "Though far from a destructive in politics, he was always keenly alive to what he supposed to be the evils and abuses of the existing state of things both in Church and State, while he remained constant in his allegiance to what he believed to be the essentials of both... On all subjects he spoke his mind, often, through whim or impatience, more than his mind, freely, without regard to consequences." On a vacation in 1818 Hartley met the poet Chauncy Hare Townshend, who said the following of him: "I cannot easily convey to you the impression of interest which he made on my mind at that time. There was something so wonderfully original in his method of expressing himself, that on me, then a young man, and only cognisant externally of the prose of life, his sayings, all stamped with the impress of poetry, produced an effect analogous to that which the mountains of Cumberland, and the scenery of the North, were working on my southern-born eye and imagination." He had inherited much of his father's character, and his lifestyle was such that, although he was successful in gaining a fellowship at