Mary Evans

[2] After the death of his father in 1781, Coleridge attended Christ's Hospital, a boarding school in London.

While in London, Coleridge befriended several boys at the school, including Tom Evans.

[3] Although he felt passionately about her, he did not share his feelings with her, and when he happened to see her leaving a church in Wrexham in 1794 he 'turned sick and all but fainted away'.

The letter reopened old feelings for Coleridge, inspiring the poem "Sonnet: To my Own Heart," which he published in his "three earlier and three later collections, as well as in Sonnets from Various Authors and has also received the title On a Discovery Made to Late.

[4] The poem was also included in letters to Robert Southey and Francis Wrangham in October, 1794, and he inserts several of the lines into a response letter to Evans in early November, after hearing of her engagement plans.