CHAPTER VIII.

ALFOXDEN: COLERIDGE: THE LYRICAL BALLADS.

ON the 13th of July 1797, William and Dorothy Wordsworth took up their residence at Alfoxden. During that month we already found them visiting the Coleridges in their cottage at Nether Stowey. They reached it on the evening of the 3rd July, and Dorothy, writing on the 4th, thus describes her first visit to the district of the Quantocks:

“There is everything here; sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic; and William and I, in a wander by ourselves, found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills covered with full-grown timber trees. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand parts of the neighbourhood of the lakes."

The waterfall referred to is the small cascade in the Alfoxden dell, a bowshot from the house, to which so many future visits were paid by themselves and Coleridge. They found that the mansion of Alfoxden, belonging to Mrs St Albyn, was to let. Wordsworth applied for it, and got it on lease. They do not seem to have returned to Racedown, but to have transferred themselves from Stowey to Alfoxden nine days after they first saw the old mansion-house. Miss Wordsworth gives the following account of their new abode, a month after they entered it :

See Memoirs, vol. i., p. 102.

"ALFOXDEN NEAR NETHER-STOWEY, SOMERSETSHIRE,

August 14, 1797.

"Here we are in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer around us. But I must begin with the day of leaving Racedown to pay Coleridge a visit. You know how much we were delighted with the neighbourhood of Stowey. . . . The evening that I wrote to you,* William and I had rambled as far as this house, and pryed into the recesses of our little brook, but without any more fixed thoughts upon it than some dreams of happiness in a little. cottage, and passing wishes that such a place might be found out. We spent a fortnight at Coleridge's: in the course of that time we heard that this house was to let, applied for it, and took it. Our principal inducement was Coleridge's society. It was a month yesterday since we came to Alfoxden.

"The house is a large mansion, with furniture enough for a dozen families like ours. There is a very excellent garden, well stocked with vegetables and fruit. The garden is at the end of the house, and our favourite parlour, as at Racedown, looks that way. In front is a little court, with grass plot, gravel walk, and shrubs; the moss roses were in full beauty a month ago. The front of the house is to the south, but it is screened from the sun by a high hill which rises immediately from it. This hill is beautiful, scattered irregularly and abundantly with trees, and topped with fern, which spreads a considerable way down it. The deer dwell here, and sheep, so that we have a living prospect. From the end of the house we have a view of the sea, over a woody meadow-country; and exactly opposite the window where I now sit is an immense wood, whose round top from this point has exactly the appearance of a mighty dome. In

* July 4th.

some parts of this wood there is an under grove of hollies which are now very beautiful. In a glen at the bottom of the wood is the waterfall of which I spoke, a quarter of a mile from the house. We are three miles from Stowey, and not two miles from the sea. Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedgerows, but scattered over with trees. The hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries, or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. . Walks extend for miles over the hill-tops; the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity: they are perfectly smooth, without rocks.

...

"The Tor of Glastonbury is before our eyes during more than half of our walk to Stowey; and in the park wherever we go, keeping about fifteen yards above the house, it makes a part of our prospect."

Alfoxden has been somewhat enlarged since Wordsworth's time, but the view from it is still very much as it was described by Dorothy at the end of last century. The tall larch tree is gone, though its site is easily traced, about twenty yards to the south-east of the house. The glen is not much changed. The "dome" of wood, the hills "topped with fern," the grove of holly, are all as they were; and the garden is the same as of old, surrounded by a lofty wall. There are some very large elms in the grounds, which must have been standing in Wordsworth's time-one in particular, to the north-east, as the ground slopes down to the public road.

It was to be nearer Coleridge that Wordsworth left Racedown; but the circle into which his residence at Alfoxden introduced him, though small, was in many respects a distinguished one. In addition to Coleridge, it included Mr Thomas Poole of Nether Stowey, a very

remarkable man, and one of the greatest friends Coleridge ever had. Bristol was so near that Southey, Cottle, and others could easily come down. Charles Lloyd lived much with Coleridge, and George Burnet, one of his Pantisocratic friends, was a frequent visitor. Macintosh (afterwards Sir James) used to come, and Bowles, and more important still, Charles Lamb was an occasional guest. In 1793 Bristol was the second city in England, with a population of 100,000 inhabitants, or more than double that of Liverpool. A famous democrat, John Thelwall, who had recently been tried for high treason, lived not far off. In the Fenwick note to the Anecdote for Fathers,* Wordsworth says that Thelwall had renounced politics, and lived at Liswyn Farm, a beautiful spot on the Wye, where he had taken to agriculture, although with no greater success than he achieved in politics. He also tells us that he and his sister, along with Coleridge, had visited Thelwall at his place on the Wye. But, although the Fenwick note is ambiguous, it must have been before this visit to Liswyn. that Wordsworth made Thelwall's acquaintance. "Thelwall seems to have been a visitor at Stowey on the 18th July 1797, and from the following passage in a letter to his wife it will be seen that Coleridge went over to Alfoxden very soon after the Wordsworths settled there, on July 11, and that Thelwall, with Mrs Coleridge, followed him thither on the 18th.

"ALFOXDEN, 18th July 1797.+

"But profit and everything else but my Stella and my Babes are now banished from my mind by the enchanting retreat (the Academus of Stowey) from which I write this,

* See vol. i., p. 203.

+ Mr Cosens's MSS.

and by the delightful society of Coleridge and of Wordsworth--the present occupier of All fox Den. We have been having a delightful ramble to-day among the plantations, and along a wild romantic dell in these grounds, through which a foaming, rushing, murmuring torrent of water winds its long artless course. There have wesometime sitting on a tree, sometime wading boot-top deep through the stream, and again stretched on some mossy stone or root of a decayed tree, a literary egotistical triumvirate-passed sentence on the productions and characters of the age-burst forth in poetical flights of enthusiasm, and philosophised our minds into a state of tranquillity which the leaders of nations might enjoy and the residents of cities can never know."

[He goes on to say that when he arrived at the Stowey cottage on the preceding night he found that Coleridge was at Alfoxden, and that Sara and he joined them before breakfast next morning.]

A large

"Faith, we are a most philosophical party! house, with grounds and plantations about it, which Wordsworth has hired, I understand, for a trifle, merely that he might enjoy the society of Coleridge, contains the enthusiastic group, consisting of C. and his Sara, W. and his sister, and myself, without any servant, male or female. An old woman who lives in an adjoining cottage does what is required for our simple wants.

'Delightful spot! O were my Stella here!'"

Thelwall was a man of great political talent, and a writer of verse, endowed with considerable poetic insight, withal a gentle soul, though a very outspoken radical. Coleridge writing to Mr Wade in 1797 said of him, "John Thelwall is a very warm-hearted honest man; and, dis