first marriage with the Harriet; the cottage where they lived
can still be seen, though much altered and modernized since the unhappy
young man and woman tried to work out together a means of right living
and mutual happiness, and made so tragic a failure of it.

It was to Lynton, too, that Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and
Coleridge, came on a visit, and were so ravished by the beauty of the
place that they were nearly decided to settle here, and might have
founded a school of Devon poets instead of Lake poets. It was at
Lynton, also, that "The Ancient Mariner" was planned, to pay for the
expenses of the holiday, and was begun by Wordsworth and Coleridge
together, though there is actually very little of Wordsworth's work in
it, and the spirit of it, the air of mystery and the sense of brooding
elemental forces with which its simplest lines are somehow invested,
belongs to Coleridge alone, and to that strange genius of his, which
only twice or thrice in his life--in "Christabel," "The Ancient
Mariner," and "Kubla Khan"--produced poetry of inimitable, strange
beauty and wonder.

If Lynton is beautiful now, with its new houses and hotels, and that
air of snugness that prosperity gives to places and persons, the poetic
appeal of its loveliness to Wordsworth and Coleridge can be well
imagined when only the low-browed, thatched little cottages clung to
the steep cliff-paths and clustered round the small harbour, and from
the surrounding heights and hills one looked down upon nothing but
green valleys, and from the valleys one looked up to the bare cliffs
and crags.

Southey also was drawn to this corner of England by the fame of its
beauty; on one occasion, when walking across Exmoor, he was driven to
take refuge at Porlock from the heavy rain, and visitors to the Ship
Inn are still shown the corner by the wide old fireplace where the
poet, presumably, dried his knees and wrote the ode which begins with
the following inadequate description:

"Porlock, thy verdant vale, so fair to sight,
Thy lofty hills, with fern and furze so brown,
Thy waters that so musical roll down
Thy woody glens, the traveller with delight
Recalls to memory, and the channel grey
Circling it, surging in thy level bay."

Then, George Eliot and Lewes discovered this north-west coast, and came
to Ilfracombe, with which they were delighted; and the unconventional
lady, with her broad-brimmed straw hat tied under her chin (in the day