hen he
published _The Borderers_ in 1842, and says in a note that it was 'at
first written ... without any view to its exhibition upon the stage'.
But he was mistaken. The contemporaneous letters of Coleridge to
Cottle show that he was long in giving up the hope of getting it
accepted by some theatrical manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation of the first volume of the
_Lyrical Ballads_ for the press, and it was published toward the close
of 1798. The book, which contained also _The Ancient Mariner_ of
Coleridge, attracted little notice, and that in great part
contemptuous. When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after sold his
copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was reckoned
at _zero_, and it was at last given up to the authors. A few persons
were not wanting, however, who discovered the dawn-streaks of a new
day in that light which the critical fire-brigade thought to
extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of cold water.

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one morning and finding himself
famous, and it is quite an ordinary fact, that a blaze may be made
with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by thousands who would
have thought the sunrise tedious. If we may believe his biographer,
Wordsworth might have said that he awoke and found himself infamous,
for the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_ undoubtedly raised him to
the distinction of being the least popular poet in England. Parnassus
has two peaks; the one where improvising poets cluster; the other
where the singer of deep secrets sits alone,--a peak veiled sometimes
from the whole morning of a generation by earth-born mists and smoke
of kitchen fires, only to glow the more consciously at sunset, and
after nightfall to crown itself with imperishable stars. Wordsworth
had that self-trust which in the man of genius is sublime, and in the
man of talent insufferable. It mattered not to him though all the
reviewers had been in a chorus of laughter or conspiracy of silence
behind him. He went quietly over to Germany to write more Lyrical
Ballads, and to begin a poem on the growth of his own mind, at a time
when there were only two men in the world (himself and Coleridge) who
were aware that he had one, or at least one anywise differing from
those mechanically uniform ones which are stuck drearily, side by
side, in the great pin-paper of society.

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company with Klopstock, and after
dinner th