no garden. But in Coleridge's day there was a small plot of
ground belonging to the house and running back to the large and
pleasant place of his friend Poole. It was upon this little garden that
the imagination of the new tenant was fixed, and there he saw, in his
dream, the corn and the cabbages and the potatoes growing luxuriantly
under his watchful and happy care; enough, he hoped, to feed himself
and his family, and to keep a couple of what he called "snouted and
grunting cousins" on the surplus. "Literature," he wrote, "though I
shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with me. My
poetic vanity and my political favour have been exhaled, and I would
rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I
could not unite them both." How amusing are men's dreams--those of
humility as well as those of ambition! There is a peculiarly Coleridgean
touch in that last hint of uniting Milton and the market-gardener.

In fact, I doubt whether the garden ever paid expenses; but, on the
other hand, the crop of poetry that sprung from Coleridge's marvellous
mind was rich and splendid. It was while he lived in this poor little
cottage that he produced "Osorio," "Fears in Solitude," "Ode to
France," the first part of "Christabel," "Frost at Midnight," "The
Nightingale," "Kubla Khan," and "The Ancient Mariner," and planned with
his friend Wordsworth "Lyrical Ballads," the most epoch-making book of
modern English poetry. Truly this year, from April, 1797, to April,
1798, was the _annus mirabilis_ of his life. Never again was he so
happy, never again did he do such good work, as when he harboured in
this cottage, and slipped through the back gate to walk in the garden
or read in the library of his good friend, Thomas Poole, or trudged
down the road to the woods of Alfoxton to talk with the Wordsworths. He
wrote lovingly of the place:

"And now, beloved Stowey, I behold
Thy Church-tower, and methinks, the four huge elms
Clustering, which mark the mansion of my friend;
And close behind them, hidden from my view,
Is my own lovely cottage, where my babe
And my babe's mother dwell in peace."

Dorothea and I were not sure that Mrs. Coleridge enjoyed the cottage as
much as he did. Greta Hall, at Keswick, with its light airy rooms and
its splendid view, was her next home; and when we saw it, a few weeks
later, we were glad that the babe and the babe's mother had lived
there.

But the