me, and
some assistance given in planning the poem; but our styles agreed so
little, that I withdrew from the concern, and he finished it himself.

In the course of that spring I composed many poems, most of which were
printed at Bristol, in one volume, by my friend Joseph Cottle, along
with Coleridge's 'Ancient Mariner,' and two or three other of his
pieces.

In the autumn of 1798, Mr. Coleridge, a friend of his Mr. Chester, my
sister, and I, crossed from Yarmouth to Hamburgh, where we remained a
few days, and saw, several times, Klopstock the poet. Mr. Coleridge and
his friend went to Ratzburg, in the north of Germany, and my sister and
I preferred going southward; and for the sake of cheapness, and the
neighbourhood of the Hartz Mountains, we spent the winter at the old
imperial city of Goslar. The winter was perishingly cold--the coldest of
this century; and the good people with whom we lodged told me one
morning, that they expected to find me frozen to death, my little
sleeping room being immediately over an archway. However, neither my
sister nor I took any harm.

We returned to England in the following spring, and went to visit our
friends the Hutchinsons, at Sockburn-on-Tees, in the county of Durham,
with whom we remained till the 19th of December. We then came, on St.
Thomas's Day, the 21st, to a small cottage at Town-End, Grasmere, which,
in the course of a tour some months previously with Mr. Coleridge, I had
been pleased with, and had hired. This we furnished for about a hundred
pounds, which sum had come to my sister by a legacy from her uncle
Crackanthorp.

I fell to composition immediately, and published, in 1800, the second
volume of the 'Lyrical Ballads.'

In the year 1802 I married Mary Hutchinson, at Brompton, near
Scarborough, to which part of the country the family had removed from
Sockburn. We had known each other from childhood, and had practised
reading and spelling under the same old dame at Penrith, a remarkable
personage, who had taught three generations, of the upper classes
principally, of the town of Penrith and its neighbourhood.

After our marriage we dwelt, together with our sister, at Town-End,
where three of our children were born. In the spring of 1808, the
increase of our family caused us to remove to a larger house, then just
built, Allan Bank, in the same vale; where our two younger children were
born, and who died at the rectory, the house we afterwards occupied for
two ye