during another winter would be attended with so many serious inconveniences, especially to my brother, who has no quiet corner in which to pursue his studies, no room but that where we all sit that we feel that nothing short of absolute impossibility should prevent us from moving. Ever since my brother's return from London, we have thought about our removal to Coleorton as the only scheme in our power; but I abstained from speaking of it to you, thinking that at our meeting all things might be better explained. The solitude would be no evil to us with such a treasure of books, and even the dirty roads a trifling one, the house being so large that it would not be irksome or unhealthful to be confined there in rainy weather. There is but one circumstance which casts a damp upon our prospects .. the being in your house and you not there; so near you, as it were, and not enjoying your society. On this account, if any house should become vacant in this neighbourhood before the beginning of winter, of course it would be desirable to take it, and defer our journey till the end of next summer, when you will be there also―for I hope there will be no further delay in the finishing of your building.

In another letter, two months later, she said that as soon as they received the invitation to Coleorton, they "determined to seek no further for a house in this neighbourhood, except in the case of Coleridge's wintering at Keswick, should he determine so to do; if, within three or four miles of Keswick (which is very improbable), a suitable house should be vacant, my brother will take it, for the sake of being near to Coleridge."

On the 21st August Wordsworth wrote to Sir George, congratulating him upon Coleridge's arrival and recovery from illness, and referred again, at some length, to the Place

Fell property (see p. 32). His allusion to this is noteworthy :

"My uneasiness did not arise so much from being thus betrayed into an obligation to Lord Lowther, as from the specific circumstances attending that obligation. It is my opinion that a man of letters (and indeed all public men of every pursuit) ought to be severely frugal. If I ought to be frugal of my own money, much more ought I to be so of another person's, particularly of a generous-minded person. Now the object here was not worth an additional £200 of my own money, and therefore much less of Lord Lowther's. Had indeed the object been very important, such as putting me in possession of a place where I had long lived, and with which I had connected many interesting feelings, I might not have thought that any sense of honour or independence, however nice, ought to call upon me to shrink from such an act of kindness and munificence. But this was not the case

here; the spot had little to recommend it to me but its own beauty, and Providence has dealt so kindly with this country that this is little distinction.

Applethwaite, I hope, will remain in my family for many generations. With my will it should never be parted with,* unless the character of the place be entirely changed, as I am sorry to say there is some reason to apprehend; a cottonmill being, I am told, already planted, or to be planted, in the glen. I shall see the place to-morrow.

The matter of your advice about building I have long laid to my heart; and it has (as is common in these cases) just answered the purpose of quickening the temptation to be dabbling. The temptation I like, and I should content myself with the pleasure it gives me through my whole life (I have at least built five hundred houses, in five hundred different places, with garden, grounds, &c.), but I have no

* It still belongs to the Wordsworths.

But

house to cover me, and know not where to get one. seriously, I do not mean to entangle myself with rashness. This is what everybody has said, and means nothing. What then shall I say? My object is not to build a new house, only to add two rooms to an old one, and this on the supposition that we do not go southward with Coleridge.

I told Wilkinson frankly, yet in as gentle a manner as I could, that I should not have accepted Lord L.'s offer if I had been consulted, and upon what principle I should have refused. This he took very well, and seemed quite happy that he had not consulted me. The spot I reexamined last Sunday, and a most beautiful one it is. How happy should I be to show it to you and Lady Beaumont ! I don't know any place where more recommendation lies in so little room.

I like your idea of republishing your ancestor's poems, and promise myself great pleasure in reading them. If I could be of any service in editing the book, nothing would give me more satisfaction, either in the way of prefixing a life, carrying the work through the press, or anything else. As soon as we have seen Coleridge we shall be able to say something positive about our journey to Coleorton."

During the same autumn, and before they left Grasmere, Wordsworth wrote thus to Sir George :

I like your ancestor's verses the more, the more I see of them; they are manly, dignified, and extremely harmonious. I do not remember in any author of that age such a series of well-tuned couplets.

What shall I say of Coleridge? or what can I say? My dear friend, this is certain, that he is destined to be unhappy. I would not distress you and Lady Beaumont with this, but it is not to be kept from you, and ought not, loving him and us as you do. I believe I have spoken to

Lady Beaumont of his domestic situation, so that the little which I shall now say will not be altogether new, and therefore will, I hope, be less felt. In fact, he dare not go home, he recoils so much from the thought of domesticating with Mrs C., with whom, though on many accounts he much respects her, he is so miserable that he dare not encounter it. What a deplorable thing! I have written to him to say that if he does not come down immediately, I must insist upon seeing him somewhere. If he appoints London, I shall go. I believe if anything good is to be done for him, it must be done by me. He has no plan for his own residence, and as yet has taken no notice of anything we have said of our movements depending upon him and his."

About the same time Dorothy wrote to Lady Beaumont"I have put off writing to you for many days, hoping always that the next post would bring us a letter from Coleridge himself, from which some comfort might be gathered, and a more accurate estimate formed of the state of his mind. But no letter has arrived. I have, however, the satisfaction of telling you that he is to be at home on the 29th of this month. He has written to acquaint Mrs Coleridge with this, and has told her that he has some notion of giving a course of lectures in London in the winter. This is all we know; I do not imagine he has mentioned the subject of the lectures to Mrs C. Whatever his plan may be, I confess I very much wish he may not put it in practice, and for many reasons: first, because I fear his health would suffer from late hours, and being led too much into company; and, in the second place, I would fain see him address the whole powers of his soul to some great work in prose or verse, of which the effect would be permanent, and not personal and transitory. I do not mean to say that much permanent good may not be produced by communicating knowledge by means of lectures, but a man

is perpetually tempted to lower himself to his hearers, to bring them into sympathy with him, and no one would be more likely to yield to such temptation than Coleridge; therefore at every period of his life the objection would have applied to his devoting himself to this employment. But at this present time it seems almost necessary that he should have one grand object before him, which would turn his thoughts away in a steady course from his own unhappy lot, and so prevent petty irritations and distresses, and in the end produce a habit of reconcilement and submission.

My dear friend, you will judge how much we have suffered from anxiety and distress within the few last weeks. We have long known how unfit Coleridge and his wife were for each other; but we had hoped that his ill-health, and the present need his children have of his care and fatherly instructions, and the reflections of his own mind during this long absence would have so wrought upon him that he might have returned home with comfort, ready to partake of the blessings of friendship, which he surely has in an abundant degree, and to devote himself to his studies and his children. I now trust he has brought himself into this state of mind, but as we have had no letters from him since that miserable one which we received a short time before my brother mentioned the subject to Sir George, I do not know what, his views are. Poor soul! he had a struggle of many years, striving to bring Mrs C. to a change of temper, and something like communion with him in his enjoyments. He is now, I trust, effectually convinced that he has no power of this sort, and he has had so long a time to know and feel this, that I would gladly hope things will not be so bad as he imagines when he finds himself once again with his children under his own roof. If he can make use of the knowledge which he has of the utter impossibility of producing powers and qualities of mind which are not in her,