teral 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 Linton. 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 chuse 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 Linton, which we did not reach
till near midnight, and where we had some difficulty in making a lodgment.
We however knocked the people of the house up at