Today in History: October 21

It was on a day like this.

On October 21, 1772 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born. Poet and locutor, Coleridge was the founder of the Romantic movement of English literature along with his friend William Wordsworth. A lifelong sufferer of depression and anxiety, he became an opium addict as an adult but is best known for the seminal work "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" which gave the world the image of an albatross hanging from one's neck.  Thomas Carlyle wrote of him, "I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers. Besides, it was talk not flowing any whither, like a river, but spreading everywhither in inextricable currents and regurgitations like a lake or a sea; terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay, often in logical intelligability; what you were to believe or do, or any earthly or heavenly thing, obstinately refused to appear from it."

It was today in 1940 that Prime Minister Winston Churchill taunted Adolph Hitler in a radio broadcast from London, saying "We are waiting for the long-promised invasion. So are the fishes." The invasion of Britain was not ever to come, despite the inroads of the aerial Blitz unleashed by Hitler's Luftwaffe.

It was In 1879 that Thomas Alva Edison invented a workable electric incandescent lamp after fourteen months of experimentation at his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory. Said the genius, "The longer it burned, the more fascinated we were...There was no sleep for any of us for forty hours." The bulb was to remain shining for 13 and one-half hours.

The death angel came for Lord Horatio Nelson on this date in 1805 as he commanded the British fleet embattled at Trafalgar against the combined Spanish and French forces. The British fleet met with victory, but Nelson met his match in the form of a musket volley that penetrated his left shoulder while serving on the deck of HMS Victory. Presumably rent with grief, ship's surgeon Mr. Beattie removed the offending musket ball from the hero and was to later have it mounted in crystal and silver for display.

In 1945, Argentine caudillo Juan Peron married bit actress Evita Peron.

October 21 is the feast of Saint Hilarion, an anchorite of the 4th C. AD who sought to imitate the life of St. Anthony of Egypt. Born near Gaza of pagan parents, Hilarion lived a life of great abstinence. He was, however, visited by great temptations which he described as visions of voluptuous nude women, gladitorial contests, and sumptuous meals - all of which was at odds with the descriptions of his self-imposed penury and penitence as described by St. Jerome. Credited with numerous miracles, he is also known to have cured horses and camels of evil possession. He died at Cyprus in 371 AD