When Coleridge described the landscapes he passed through while
scrambling among the fells, mountains, and valleys of Britain, he did
something unprecedented in Romantic writing: to capture what emerged
before his eyes, he enlisted a geometric idiom. Immersed in a culture
still beholden to Euclid's Elements and schooled by those who subscribed
to its principles, he valued geometry both for its pragmatic function
and for its role as a conduit to abstract thought. Indeed, his geometric
training would often structure his observations on religion, aesthetics,
politics, and philosophy. For Coleridge, however, this perspective never
competed with his sensitivity to the organic nature of his surroundings
but, rather, intermingled with it. Situating Coleridge's remarkable ways
of seeing within the history and teaching of mathematics and alongside
the eighteenth century's budding interest in non-Euclidean geometry, Ann
Colley illuminates the richness of the culture of walking and the
surprising potential of landscape writing.