vale of Grasmere,
if it can interest you to know the place, and in the latter end of
1808, if you can be supposed to care about the time, did me the favour
of making me known to John Wilson, or as I might say (upon the
Scottish fashion of designating men from their territorial
pretensions) to Elleray. I remember the whole scene as circumstantially
as if it belonged to but yesterday. In the vale of Grasmere,--that
peerless little vale which you and Gray the poet and so many others have
joined in admiring as the very Eden of English beauty, peace, and
pastoral solitude,--you may possibly recall, even from that flying
glimpse you had of it, a modern house called Allan Bank, standing under
a low screen of woody rocks which descend from the hill of Silver How,
on the western side of the lake. This house had been then recently built
by a worthy merchant of Liverpool; but for some reason of no importance
to you and me, not being immediately wanted for the family of the
owner, had been let for a term of three years to Mr. Wordsworth. At the
time I speak of, both Mr. Coleridge and myself were on a visit to Mr.
Wordsworth; and one room on the ground floor, designed for a
breakfasting-room, which commands a sublime view of the three
mountains,--Fairfield, Arthur's Chair, and Seat Sandal (the first of
them within about four hundred feet of the highest mountains in Great
Britain), was then occupied by Mr. Coleridge as a study. On this
particular day, the sun having only just set, it naturally happened that
Mr. Coleridge--whose nightly vigils were long--had not yet come down to
breakfast: meantime, and until the epoch of the Coleridgian breakfast
should arrive, his study was lawfully disposable to profaner uses. Here,
therefore, it was, that, opening the door hastily in quest of a book, I
found seated, and in earnest conversation, two gentlemen--one of them my
host, Mr. Wordsworth, at that time about thirty-seven or thirty-eight
years old; the other was a younger man by good sixteen or seventeen
years, in a sailor's dress, manifestly in robust health--_fervidus
juventa_, and wearing upon his countenance a powerful expression of
ardour and animated intelligence, mixed with much good nature. _'Mr.
Wilson of Elleray'_--delivered, as the formula of introduction, in the
deep tones of Mr. Wordsworth--at once banished the momentary surprise I
felt on finding an unknown stranger where I had expected nobody, and
substituted a surprise of anoth