ion which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great
preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As
a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to
Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so
noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But
Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind,
a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even
imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by
nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be
seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on
(notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy
Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with
heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think)
unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by
his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly
thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the
greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is
evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798:
"I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness.
And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as
that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of
implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by
combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and
clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his
revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious
exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled
existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.

The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical
Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798. The origin of the work
has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are
Seven") and by Coleridge (in the _Biographia Literaria_, chap. xiv.). At
first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of which
should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan
was thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was
begun. As this poem grew under Coleridge's "shaping-spirit of
imagination" Wordsworth saw that he "could only be a clog" upo