verse met with no collateral interruption.
Returning that same evening, I got into a metaphysical argument with
Wordsworth, while Coleridge was explaining the different notes of the
nightingale to his sister, in which we neither of us succeeded in
making ourselves perfectly clear and intelligible. Thus I passed three
weeks at Nether Stowey and in the neighbourhood, generally devoting
the afternoons to a delightful chat in an arbour made of bark by the
poet's friend Tom Poole, sitting under two fine elm-trees, and
listening to the bees humming round us, while we quaffed our _flip_.
It was agreed, among other things, that we should make a jaunt down
the Bristol Channel, as far as Lynton. We set off together on foot,
Coleridge, John Chester, and I. This Chester was a native of Nether
Stowey, one of those who were attracted to Coleridge's discourse as
flies are to honey, or bees in swarming-time to the sound of a brass
pan. He 'followed in the chace, like a dog who hunts, not like one
that made up the cry.' He had on a brown cloth coat, boots, and
corduroy breeches, was low in stature, bow-legged, had a drag in his
walk like a drover, which he assisted by a hazel switch, and kept on a
sort of trot by the side of Coleridge, like a running footman by a
state coach, that he might not lose a syllable or sound, that fell
from Coleridge's lips. He told me his private opinion, that Coleridge
was a wonderful man. He scarcely opened his lips, much less offered an
opinion the whole way: yet of the three, had I to choose during that
journey, I would be John Chester. He afterwards followed Coleridge
into Germany, where the Kantean philosophers were puzzled how to bring
him under any of their categories. When he sat down at table with his
idol, John's felicity was complete; Sir Walter Scott's, or Mr.
Blackwood's, when they sat down at the same table with the King, was
not more so. We passed Dunster on our right, a small town between the
brow of a hill and the sea. I remember eyeing it wistfully as it lay
below us: contrasted with the woody scene around, it looked as clear,
as pure, as _embrowned_ and ideal as any landscape I have seen since,
of Gaspar Poussin's or Domenichino's. We had a long day's march--(our
feet kept time to the echoes of Coleridge's tongue)--through Minehead
and by the Blue Anchor, and on to Lynton, which we did not reach till
near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgement.
We, however, knocke