simile about the purple morning falling over the mountainside in flakes of light, and expressed sorrow at seeing the purple morning confined so like a maniac in a straitwaistcoat. Such was Wordsworth's reception. In 1797, he held no position as a poet. Before this time Coleridge was beginning to be talked about. Wordsworth had heard of him, and he went over to Bristol to see him. He was then settled with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, a woman of education and refined feeling, at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Rather later Coleridge visited Wordsworth, and was much stimulated by his conversation. They had a good deal in common. Their political sympathies were akin, and their poetic taste was similiar. Both were at work on tragedies, Coleridge's tragedy Osorio," having been begun in the hope-not without grounds of assurance-that Sheridan would consider it for Drury Lane. Wordsworth's tragedy, "The Borderers," was to be introduced to the manager of Covent Garden. "I am sojourning for a few days at Racedown, Dorset, the mansion of our friend Wordsworth; who presents his kindest regards to you," writes Coleridge to Cottle. "Wordsworth admires my tragedy, which gives me great hopes. Wordsworth has written a tragedy himself. I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and, I think, unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side, and yet I do not think myself a less man than I formerly thought myself. His drama is absolutely wonderful." At a later date Coleridge writes with yet more emphasis: "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." Wordsworth's impressions of Coleridge can hardly have been less favourable than language like this implies. When Coleridge removed to Stowey, Wordsworth removed to Alfoxden, to be near enough to enjoy Coleridge's society. It is from Dorothy Wordsworth that we get the record of the early days of the friendship now begun. "Coleridge is a wonderful man," she writes, "his face teems with mind, soul, and spirit. Then he is so benevolent, so good-tempered and cheerful.

At first I thought him plain—that is, for about three minutes he is pale, thin, has a wide mouth, thick lips, and not very good teeth, longish, loose-growing, halfcurling, rough black hair. . . . His eye is large and full, and not very dark, but grey, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind: it has more of 'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling,' than I have ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows, and over-hanging forehead." Of Wordsworth's sister, Coleridge has left an equally graphic picture. "She is a woman indeed!" he said, “in mind, I mean, and heart; for her person is such, that if you expected to see a pretty woman you would think her rather ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman you would think her pretty!" There is a suspicion that Coleridge's wife was not altogether so well pleased with her new neighbours. Miss Wordsworth is said to have angered Mrs. Coleridge by making free with her shawls, and by taking long walks with her

husband. Such were the beginnings of one of the most memorable of literary friendships. It resulted in a poetic movement of the highest importance in the history of English letters; and it was beautiful, and pathetic, and lasting in itself. No doubt each of these vigorous and original minds influenced the other; but it would be vain to try to estimate the reciprocation of influence.

The friends met often, and their conversation turned contantly on two cardinal points of poetry, "the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of the imagination." They thought of the sudden charm which moonlight or sunset gives to a familiar landscape, and this combination of the actual and familiar with the glamour of the supernatural appeared to say that the two cardinal points of poetry-reality and imagination-might be united. The thought then suggested itself, that on this basis a series of poems could be composed of two sorts. In the one the incidents and agents were to be in part supernatural; in the other, the characters and incidents were to be chosen from ordinary village life. Coleridge was to direct himself to the romantic element, and to give to supernatural incidents the reality of human interest. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose to himself a series of realistic themes, and to give a charm. analogous to that of the supernatural to things of everyday life. The result of this idea was the poems known as the "Lyrical Ballads." Coleridge wrote for his share "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "The Dark Ladie," and the first part of "Christabel." Wordsworth

wrote a much larger body of poetry in pursuance of the scheme.

This account of the origin of the "Lyrical Ballads" is practically Coleridge's. But Wordsworth's statement, though not irreconcilable with that of his brother poet, is distinctly more prosaic. Wordsworth says that in the autumn of 1797 he started from Alfoxden with his sister and Coleridge, with a view to visit Linton and the Valley of Rocks. The united funds were very small, and they agreed to defray the expenses of the tour by writing a poem to be sent to The Monthly Magazine. Accordingly, in the course of their walk, they planned the poem of the "Ancient Mariner," founded on a dream of a friend of Coleridge, the Mr. Cruikshank who was his neighbour at Stowey. Much the greater part of the story was Coleridge's invention, but certain parts Wordsworth suggested. "For example," says Wordsworth, "some crime to be committed which would bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's 'Voyages,' a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. 'Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime?' The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly." The poets began the composition together on that evening, but their respective manners proved so

widely different, that Wordsworth withdrew from the undertaking. In Coleridge's hands the poem grew until it became too important for their first object, which was limited to the earning of five pounds, and they began to think of a volume which was to consist of poems chiefly on supernatural subjects.

It is certain that Coleridge's poetic genius was much stimulated by Wordsworth's conversation. Besides, writing the "Ancient Mariner," "The Dark Ladie," and the first part of "Christabel "-poems that were intended to realize the preconceived ideal-Coleridge finished his tragedy "Osorio," and wrote "The Three Graves," "Fears in Solitude," "France, an Ode," and "Kubla Khan," during the period in which he and Wordsworth

I

The circumstances attending the composition of “Kubla Khan ” are sufficiently curious to merit a separate statement. This is Coleridge's account: "In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in 'Purchas's Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto: and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.' The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that