ived, and was well received. The country about Nether Stowey is
beautiful, green and hilly, and near the sea-shore. I saw it but the other
day, after an interval of twenty years, from a hill near Taunton. How was
the map of my life spread out before me, as the map of the country lay at
my feet! In the afternoon, Coleridge took me over to All-Foxden, a
romantic old family-mansion of the St. Aubins, where Wordsworth lived. It
was then in the possession of a friend of the poet's, who gave him the
free use of it. Somehow that period (the time just after the French
Revolution) was not a time when _nothing was given for nothing_. The mind
opened, and a softness might be perceived coming over the heart of
individuals, beneath "the scales that fence" our self-interest. Wordsworth
himself was from home, but his sister kept house, and set before us a
frugal repast; and we had free access to her brother's poems, the _Lyrical
Ballads_, which were still in manuscript, or in the form of _Sybilline
Leaves_. I dipped into a few of these with great satisfaction, and with
the faith of a novice. I slept that night in an old room with blue
hangings, and covered with the round-faced family-portraits of the age of
George I. and II. and from the wooded declivity of the adjoining park that
overlooked my window, at the dawn of day, could

----"hear the loud stag speak."

In the outset of life (and particularly at this time I felt it so) our
imagination has a body to it. We are in a state between sleeping and
waking, and have indistinct but glorious glimpses of strange shapes, and
there is always something to come better than what we see. As in our
dreams the fulness of the blood gives warmth and reality to the coinage of
the brain, so in youth our ideas are clothed, and fed, and pampered with
our good spirits; we breathe thick with thoughtless happiness, the weight
of future years presses on the strong pulses of the heart, and we repose
with undisturbed faith in truth and good. As we advance, we exhaust our
fund of enjoyment and of hope. We are no longer wrapped in _lamb's-wool_,
lulled in Elysium. As we taste the pleasures of life, their spirit
evaporates, the sense palls; and nothing is left but the phantoms, the
lifeless shadows of what _has been_!

That morning, as soon as breakfast was over, we strolled out into the
park, and seating ourselves on the trunk of an old ash-tree that stretched
along the ground, Coleridge read aloud with a