I arrived, 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 _Sibylline 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 fullness 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 alo