n
the summer of 1798." It was therefore composed at Alfoxden, that
plain stone house in West Somersetshire, which Dorothy and William
Wordsworth rented for the sum of L23 for one year, the rent covering
the use of "a large park, with seventy head of deer."

Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also to
the peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularly
unaltered. The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep umbrageous
drive to the point where the house, the park around it, and the
Quantocks above them suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day very
much what Wordsworth's visitors saw when they trudged up from Stowey
to commune with him in 1797. The barrier of ancient beech-trees
running up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch of fields
and woods descending northward to the expanse of the yellow Severn
Channel, the plain white facade of Alfoxden itself, with its easy
right of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous pathway down
to the glen, the poet's favourite parlour at the end of the house--all
this presents an impression which is probably less transformed,
remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identified
with the early or even the middle life of the poet. That William and
Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so noble a country
property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between
Alfoxden and Coleridge's squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never
cease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the trustees in
admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered,
"to keep the house inhabited during the minority of the owner;" it was
let to the poet on the 14th of July 1797.

It was in this delicious place, under the shadow of "smooth Quantock's
airy ridge," that Wordsworth's genius came of age. It was during the
twelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost the final traces of the
old traditional accent of poetry. It was here that the best of the
_Lyrical Ballads_ were written, and from this house the first volume
of that epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press. Among the
poems written at Alfoxden _Peter Bell_ was prominent, but we hear
little of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths
by Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted to
read "the sibylline leaves," and on a second had the rare pleasure
of hearing Wordsworth himself chant _Peter Bell_