'superior,' says Coleridge, 'to anything in our language.' This probably included the story of Margaret, or The Ruined Cottage,' which now stands at the opening of 'The Excursion,' and certainly, in blank verse, Wordsworth never surpassed that. When they parted Coleridge says, 'I felt myself a small man beside Wordsworth;' while of Coleridge, Wordsworth, certainly no over-estimater of other men, said, 'I have known many men who have done wonderful things, but the only wonderful man I ever knew was Coleridge.' Their first intercourse had ripened into friendship, and they longed to see more of each other. As Coleridge was at this time living at the village of Nether Stowey in Somersetshire, the Wordsworths removed in the autumn of 1797 to the country-house of Alfoxden, in the immediate neighbourhood. The time he spent at Alfoxden was one of the most delightful seasons of Wordsworth's life. The two young men were of one mind in their poetic tastes and principles, one too in political and social views, and each admired the other more than he did any other living man. In outward circumstances, too, they were alike; both poor in money, but rich in thought and imagination, both in the prime of youth, and boundless in hopeful energy. That summer as they wandered aloft on the airy ridge of Quantock, or dived down its silvan combs, what high talk they must have held! Theirs was the age for boundless, endless, unwearied talk on all things human and divine. Hazlitt has said of Coleridge in his youth, that he seemed as if he would talk on for ever, and you wished him to talk on for ever. With him, as his youth, so was his age. But most men, as life wears on, having found that all their many and vehement talkings have served no lasting end of the soul, grow more brief and taciturn. Long after, Wordsworth speaks of this as a very pleasant and productive time. The poetic well-head, now fairly unsealed, was flowing freely. Many of the shorter poems were then composed from the scenery that was before his eyes, and from incidents there seen or heard. Among the most characteristic of these were, 'We are Seven,' 'The Mad Mother,' The Last of the Flock,' 'Simon Lee,' Expostulation and Reply,' 'The Tables Turned,' Lines to his Sister,' beginning 'It is the first mild day of March,' Lines in Early Spring,' beginning I heard a thousand blended notes,' the last containing these words, which give the key-note to Wordsworth's feeling about nature at this time 6 ' And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.' ) If any one will read over the short poems above named, they will let him see further into Wordsworth's mood during this, the fresh germinating spring-time of his genius, than any words about them can. The occasion of their making a joint literary venture was curious. Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister wished to make a short walking tour, for which five pounds were needed, but were not forthcoming. To supply this want they agreed to make a joint-poem, and send it to some magazine which would give the required sum. Accordingly, one evening as they trudged along the Quantock Hills, they planned The Ancient Mariner,' founded on a dream which a friend of Coleridge had dreamed. Coleridge supplied most of the incidents, and almost all the lines. Wordsworth contributed the incident of the shooting of the albatross, with a line here and there. The Ancient Mariner soon grew, till it was beyond the desired five pounds' worth, so they thought of a joint volume. Coleridge was to take supernatural subjects, or romantic, and invest them with a human interest and resemblance of truth. Wordsworth was to take common every-day incidents, and by faithful adherence to nature, and by true but modifying colours of imagination, was to shed over common aspects of earth and facts of life such a charm as light and shade, sunset and moonlight, shed over a familiar landscape. Wordsworth was so much the more industrious of the two, that he had completed enough for a volume when Coleridge had only finished The Ancient Mariner,' and begun 6 Christabel' and 'The Dark Ladie.' Cottle, a Bristol bookseller, was summoned from Bristol to arrange for publication, and he has left a gossiping but amusing account of his intercourse with the two poets at this time, and his visit to Alfoxden. He agreed to give Wordsworth £30 for the twentytwo pieces of his which made up the first volume of the Lyrical Ballads, while for 'The Rime of the Ancient Marinere,' which was to head the volume, 1 he made a separate bargain with Coleridge. This volume, which appeared in the autumn of 1798, was the first which made Wordsworth known to the world as a poet, for the 'Descriptive Sketches' had attracted little or no notice. Of the ballads or shorter poems, which, as we have seen, were mostly composed at Alfoxden, and which reflect the feelings and incidents of his life there, I shall reserve what I have to say for a more general survey. The volume closes with one poem in another style, in which the poet speaks out his inmost feelings, and in his own. grand style.' This is the poem on Tintern Abbey, composed during a walking tour on the Wye with his sister, just before leaving Alfoxden for the Continent. Read these lines over once again, however well you may know them. Bear in mind what has been told of the way his childhood and boyhood had passed, living in the eye of nature, the separation that followed from his favourite haunts and ways, the wild fermentation of thought, the moral tempest he had gone through, the return to nature's lonely places, and to common life and peaceful thoughts, with intellect and heart deepened, expanded, humanized, by having long brooded over the ever-recurring questions of man's nature and destiny; bear these things in mind, and as you read, every line of that masterpiece will come out with deeper meaning and in exacter outline. And then the concluding lines, in which the poet turns to his sister, his fellowtraveller, with the shooting lights in those wild eyes,' in which he caught 'gleams of past existence' 'If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, what prophetic pathos do these words assume when we remember how long and mournfully ere life ended those wild eyes were darkened! 6 Before the volume appeared, Wordsworth and his sister had left Alfoxden, and sailed with Coleridge for Germany. It has been said that the reason for their leaving Somersetshire was their falling under suspicion as hatchers of sedition. A Government spy, with a peculiarly long nose, was sent down to watch them. Coleridge tells an absurd story, how, as they lay on the Quantock Hills, conversing about Spinoza, the spy, as he skulked behind a bank, overheard their talk, and thought they were speaking about himself under the nickname of 'Spy-nosey.' Coleridge was believed to have little harm in him, for he was a crack-brained, talking fellow; but that Wordsworth is either a smuggler or a traitor, and means mischief. He never speaks to any one, haunts lonely places, walks by moonlight, and is always "booing about" by himself.' Such was the country talk; and the result of it was, the agent for the owner of Alfoxden refused to re-let the house to so suspicious a character. So the three determined to pack up, and winter on the Continent. At Hamburg, however, they parted company. Their ostensible purpose was to learn German, but Wordsworth and his sister did little at this. He spent the winter of 1798-99, the coldest of the century, in Goslar, and there, by the German charcoal-burners, |