d
then set out to explore the village, which is closely built along the
roads whose junction is marked by a little clock-tower. The
market-street is paved with cobble-stones, and down one side of it runs
a small brook, partly built in and covered over, but making a merry
noise all the way. Coleridge speaks of it in his letters as "the dear
gutter of Stowey."

Just outside of the town is the Castle Mound, a steep, grassy hill, to
the top of which we climbed. There was the distinct outline of the
foundations of the old castle, built in the Norman times; we could
trace the moat, and the court, and all the separate rooms; but not a
stone of the walls remained--only a ground-plan drawn in the turf of
the hill-top. All the pride and power of the Norman barons had passed
like the clouds that were sailing over the smooth ridges of the
Quantocks.

Coleridge was twenty-four years old when he came to Nether Stowey with
his young wife and a boy baby. Troubles had begun to gather around him;
he was very poor, tormented with neuralgia, unable to find regular
occupation, and estranged by a quarrel from his friend and
brother-in-law, Robert Southey. Thomas Poole, a well-to-do tanner at
Nether Stowey, a man of good education and noble character, a great
lover of poetry and liberty, had befriended Coleridge and won his deep
regard and affection. Nothing would do but that Poole should find a
cottage near to his own house, where the poet could live in quietude
and congenial companionship.

The cottage was found; and, in spite of Poole's misgivings about its
size, and his warnings in regard to the tedium and depression of
village life, Coleridge took it and moved in with his little family on
the last day of the year 1796--a cold season for a "flitting!" We can
imagine the young people coming down the Bridgewater road through the
wintry weather with their few household goods in a cart.

The cottage was at the western end of the village; and there it stands
yet, a poor, ugly house, close on the street. We went in, and after
making clear to the good woman who owned it that we were not looking
for lodgings, we saw all that there was to see of the dwelling. There
were four rooms, two downstairs and two above. All were bare and
disorderly, because, as the woman explained, house-cleaning was in
progress. It was needed. She showed us a winding stair, hardly better
than a ladder, which led from the lower to the upper rooms. There was
no view,