n its
progress, and it was resigned to Coleridge. The plan was then enlarged
to include a volume illustrating "two cardinal points of poetry, the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to
the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by
the modifying colours of imagination." Wordsworth was to illustrate the
former principle, Coleridge the latter, and the proceeds of the book
were to go toward the expenses of a trip to Germany, decided on in the
spring of 1798. The bulk of the volume was Wordsworth's, and was
typically Wordsworthian, ranging from such simple ballads of humble
incident as "Goody Blake" and "The Idiot Boy" to the magnificent blank
verse of "Tintern Abbey"; Coleridge's share consisted of a brief poem
called "The Nightingale," two short extracts from "Osorio," and "The
Rime of the Ancyent Marinere."

Apart from the "Lyrical Ballads" Coleridge conceived and finished
between June, 1797, and the departure for Germany in 1798, and published
in the latter year, "Fire, Famine, and Slaughter," "Frost at Midnight,"
"Fears in Solitude," and "France." He conceived and partly executed, but
did not then publish, "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "Love," "The Ballad of
the Dark Ladie," and "The Three Graves." Thus, all Coleridge's best
poetry, with the exception of those three saddest of voices out of a
broken life, "Dejection" (1802), the lines to Wordsworth on hearing him
read "The Prelude" (1807), and "Youth and Age" (1823-32), belongs either
wholly or in its inception to the year of his fellowship with the
Wordsworths in the Quantock Hills.

Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has
left a fairly adequate account in his published writings and his
correspondence, especially in the _Biographia Literaria_ and in the
letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year of
his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy,
an eager visionary reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent
religious feeling. "O! never can I remember those days," he wrote in the
_Biographia_, "with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most
disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points
erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then
seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to
be) the truth, and the will of my Maker." However much he may have