agreeing as we do in almost every point of religion, of morals, of politics, and philosophy, we like each other uncommonly well.”* It is of him that Wordsworth tells the story that, in the Alfoxden glen beside the waterfall, when Coleridge had remarked, " This is a place to reconcile one to all the jarrings and conflicts of the wide world," Thelwall replied, "Nay, to make one forget them altogether.” (It may be noted in passing, however, that Coleridge's was the deeper saying of the two.) Thelwall was an honest democrat, but a perfervid and blind defender of the French Revolution, and his visits to Stowey were not specially advantageous to either of the two poets. There can be little doubt that it was their friendship with this radical -the man who had narrowly escaped conviction for high treason, and whom Canning satirized in the Anti-Jacobin, "Thelwall! and ye that lecture as ye go "t-that led to their own proceedings being watched, and to Mrs St Albyn refusing to let the Wordsworths remain at Alfoxden longer than one year.

The best of Wordsworth's early Lyrics were written at Alfoxden-The Thorn, The Mad Mother, The Night Piece, Simon Lee, The Last of the Flock; above all, Expostulation and Reply, The Tables Turned, the Lines written in early spring, beginning—

"I heard a thousand blended notes,"

and the Address to his Sister, beginning―

"It is the first mild day of March."

The four last poems were composed in the very dawn of
Wordsworth's lyrical genius. The Fenwick notes will be
found to cast much light on the poet's life at this time.
The old huntsman, Simon Lee, lived in the Park.

* See Cottle's Early Recollections, vol. i., p. 254.
One of the "lecturers" was, doubtless, S. T. C.

Probably no district in Britain could have been more perfectly suited for the work that both Wordsworth and Coleridge had at this time to do, than the region of the Quantocks, and the two residences of Alfoxden and Nether Stowey. In an interesting work,* privately printed by the Rev. W. L. Nichols, of Woodlands, Bridgewater (which arose out of a paper read to the Bath Literary Club in 1871), the range of the Quantocks is called "the Oberland of Somersetshire." Mr Nichols says:

.

"The chief characteristic of Quantock scenery I venture to designate as Cheerful Beauty. Its breezy summits rise in gentle and graceful undulations, and sink into woody combes of the most romantic beauty, thickly clothed, many of them with scrub oak, and each with its own little stream winding through it; its slopes fringed with gorse and ferns of luxuriant growth, or purple with heather, and abounding everywhere with the whortleberry. The prevalence of the yew and the holly may also be noted; the former is found singly in the woods and hedgerows, or in the churchyards, of which few are without one or more specimens, often of majestic growth and venerable age. The holly is still more abundant, and the fine undergrowth of this tree, like that in the grove at Alfoxden, forms quite a speciality of these woods.

A bright account of the group that used to gather at Stowey and Alfoxden is given by Cottle, in recording his earliest visit to Stowey in July 1797. T. Poole had driven him over from Bridgewater. Lamb had just left Coleridge's cottage, and gone back to London. Coleridge took Cottle through the house, garden, and orchard, and showed him the path by which he had contrived to connect Poole's grounds with his own. The sequel is best told in Cottle's own

* The Quantocks and their Associations.

words: "We approached the 'jasmine harbour,' where, to our gratifying surprise, we found the tripod table laden with delicious bread and cheese, surmounted by a brown mug of the true Taunton ale. We instinctively took our seats; and there must have been some downright witchery in the provision, which surpassed all of its kind; nothing like it in the wide terrene, and one glass of the Taunton settled it to an axiom. While the dappled sunbeams played on our table, through the umbrageous canopy, the very birds seemed to participate in our felicities, and poured forth their selectest anthems. As we sat in our sylvan hall of splendour, a company of the happiest of mortals (T. Poole, C. Lloyd, S. T. Coleridge, and myself), the bright blue heavens, the sporting insects, the balmy zephyrs, the feathered choristers, the sympathy of friends, all augmented the pleasurable to the highest point this side the celestial! Every interstice of our hearts being filled with happiness, as a consequence there was no room for sorrow, exorcised as it now was, and hovering around at unapproachable distance. With our spirits thus entranced, though we might weep at other moments, yet joyance so filled all within and without, that if, at this juncture, tidings had been brought us that an irruption of the ocean had swallowed up all our dear brethren of Pekin, from the preoccupation of our minds, 'poor things' would have been our only reply, with anguish put off till the morrow." *

Before Wordsworth came to Alfoxden, Coleridge had familiarised himself with these water-headlands of Somersetshire,† the Quantock hills. Some of his best poetic work had already been done before the arrival of his friend, while wandering amongst the coombes or in his cottage at Stowey. He, as well as, perhaps at that time more than Words

* See Early Recollections, vol. i., p. 275-6.

+ Quantock is the Keltic name for water-headland.

worth, felt that there was a Divine Life hidden beneath the raiment of the natural world. He had learned this from Plato, and Plotinus; but he got it more especially through the intuition of his own soul in vital contact with external Nature; and it was their community of thought on all the fundamental aspects of the universe-their common love of Nature as thus symbolically interpreted, and their consequent hidden agreement as to the root whence the noblest poetry springs-that brought the two men together more than anything else.* It is a curious circumstance that, while living at Stowey, and in almost daily intercourse with Wordsworth and his sister, Coleridge records the fact that he wished to write a Poem on Man, Nature, and Society-just as Wordsworth planned it out in The Recluse-under the symbol of a brook flowing from a hidden source in the uplands to the sea. In addition to this radical tie, Coleridge and the Wordsworths had many other things in common, e.g., their sympathy with animal life, and especially with animal suffering. Coleridge, however, had not till now met with a literary aspirant, whom he could feel in any sense his superior; and he met very few in the course of his life

*

Compare the lines of Coleridge in his Eolian Harp,

"And what, if all of animated Nature

Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the soul of each and God of all,"

with the well-known passage in Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey,

"I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man :
A Motion and a Spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

who were at any single point his equal. He found more than an equal in Wordsworth, in point of insight into Nature, and above all in force of character, self-control, and power of will; although Wordsworth was his inferior in versatility and brilliance. In a letter to Joseph Cottle,* March 8th, 1798, Coleridge says "The Giant Wordsworth-God love him! When I speak in the terms of admiration due to his intellect, I fear lest these terms should keep out of sight the amiableness of his manners. He has written near twelve hundred lines of blank verse, superior, I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which any way resembles it."

Nine years afterwards, in 1807, Coleridge wrote similarly of Wordsworth to Cottle-" He is one whom, God knows, I love and honour as far beyond myself, as both morally and intellectually he is above me."

The closeness of the tie that bound these three poets (Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth) together, has its best evidence in two things-first, in the Journal which Dorothy kept of their daily life, and of the way in which Nature reveals itself to one who "watches and receives;" and secondly, in the joint work that Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and wrote in these days, viz., The Lyrical Ballads.

The origin of the Lyrical Ballads has been often told, and readers must refer to vol. i. of this edition, p. 198, for the Fenwick note to We are Seven, in which Wordsworth himself tells the story in graphic detail. The first idea was simply to raise £5 to defray the expenses of the few days' tour, which the two poets took to the "Valley of Stones,"-Dorothy Wordsworth accompanying them,—by writing a single poem jointly, and sending it to the New Monthly Magazine. Cole

* See Cottle's Early Recollections, vol. i., p. 252.