o himself; his
intimacy and his constant conferences on unknown subjects with
Coleridge, whose radical ideas were no secret; his friendship with
Thelwall the republican, who came to reside in the neighbourhood; the
rumour that the poet had lived in France and sympathized with the
Revolution--all these were dark and damning evidences to the rustic
mind that there was something wrong about this long-legged,
sober-faced, feckless young man. Probably he was a conspirator,
plotting the overthrow of the English Government, or at least of the
Tory party. So ran the talk of the country-side; and the lady who owned
Alfoxton was so alarmed by it that she declined to harbour such a
dangerous tenant any longer. Wordsworth went with his sister to Germany
in 1798; and in the following year they found a new home at Dove
Cottage, in Grasmere, among the English lakes.

On our way out to the place where we had left our equipage, we met the
owner of the estate, walking with his dogs. He was much less fierce
than his placard. It may have been something in Dorothea's way that
mollified him, but at all events he turned and walked with us to show
us the way up the "Hareknap"--the war-path of ancient armies--to a
famous point of view. There we saw the Quantock Hills, rolling all
around us. They were like long smooth steep billows of earth, covered
with bracken, and gorse, and heather just coming into bloom. Thick
woodlands hung on their sides, but above their purple shoulders the
ridges were bare. They looked more than a thousand feet high. Among
their cloven combes, deep-thicketed and watered with cool springs, the
wild red deer still find a home. And it was here (not in Cardiganshire
as the poem puts it) that Wordsworth's old huntsman, "Simon Lee,"
followed the chase of the stag.

It was a three-mile drive from Holford to Nether Stowey. Dorothea
remarked that Coleridge and the Wordsworths must have been great
walkers if this was their idea of living close together. And so they
were, for that bit of road seemed to them only a prelude to a real walk
of twenty or thirty miles. The exercise put them in tune for poetry,
and their best thoughts came to them when they were afoot.

"The George" at Nether Stowey is a very modest inn, the entrance paved
with flag-stones, the only public room a low-ceiled parlour; but its
merits are far beyond its pretensions. We lunched there most
comfortably on roast duck and green peas, cherry tart and cheese, an