ΟΝ the road to "The Valley of Stones," the walking trip on which "Lyrical Ballads" was planned by Wordsworth and Coleridge. "Thou in bewitching words, with happy heart, Didst chaunt the vision of that Ancient Man, The bright-eyed Mariner, and rueful woes Didst utter of the Lady Christabel." -The Prelude, Book xiv, p. 116. Quantock Hills, Somersetshire. Dorothy's feeling about this region and this visit is thus recorded: “There is everything here; sea, woods, wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic; and William and I, in a wander by ourselves, found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills covered with full-grown timber trees. The woods are as fine as those of Lowther, and the country more romantic." To live in so charming a country and at the same time to have Coleridge as a neighbor appealed to both guests as so highly desirable that they seem not even to have returned to the Dorsetshire farm. It happened that a fine old mansion house known as Alfoxden (now commonly called Alfoxton), just beyond the glen described by Dorothy, was for rent. Seeing this beautiful country residence to-day with its fine appointments, stables, gardens, etc.; its stately approach bordered with magnificent beeches and elms and set in its background of park, hill-side, and holly-grove, one is amazed at the thought of so much luxury as possible to the impecunious Wordsworths. Doubtless the place was less imposing then, and, the owner being in his minority, it was offered at the ridiculously paltry sum of £23 per year. Never, perhaps, were Arcadia and Academus combined at so small an outlay. Here were written many of Wordsworth's most charming minor poems, and here, conjointly with Coleridge, was planned and executed that book so ridiculed at the time, but since recognized as one of the most epoch-making in the whole history of poetry-" Lyrical Ballads." 66 It is quite a sore point with the Somerset folk to-day that Wordsworth did not make their region famous, as he has the Lake Country, by localizing the places and incidents which served him for inspiration. For example, "Lines written in Early Spring," "A Whirl-Blast from behind the Hill," "To My Sister," Ruth," etc., are full of the Somerset scenery and atmosphere for those who know the Quantock Hills. One passage in "The Prelude" (p. 116) does indeed celebrate the wonderful walking-trip made by the two poets (with Dorothy keeping step both physically and poetically) over the hills to Watchet and thence to the Valley of Rocks near Lynton; "That summer, under whose indulgent skies, Upon smooth Quantock's airy ridge we roved Wordsworth always looked back upon these Alfoxden days with keenest pleasure. And well he might, since seldom has been known a group of choicer spirits than those who came and went or stayed in this little corner of Somerset in the closing years of the eighteenth century. Charles Lamb, seeking this retreat after the great sorrow which always continued to overshadow his life; Charles Lloyd, the son of a rich Birmingham banker, rejecting a life of pleasure to devote himself to poetry and the pursuit of truth; John Thelwell, the intrepid democrat from London; Thomas Cottle, poet and publisher, who came from Bristol to hear the poets read their verses, and afterwards published them to his own great loss; Thomas Poole, a Somerset farmer of plain exterior, but a wonderful example of the thoroughly developed man, and the magnet that had at first attracted Coleridge, and through him the rest of this brilliant group. So sincere and intimate was the daily companionship of Wordsworth, Dorothy, and Coleridge that Coleridge said "We are three people but only one soul." Yet one must beware of thinking that this unity of understanding meant any weak yielding of individualities. A sympathetic writer1 has stated the case truly:-"No two men could be more unlike than the two poets who now met beside the Quantocks. Coleridge, a student and recluse from his boyhood, of immense erudition, all his life a valetudinarian, who scarcely knew what health was, ever planning mighty works, yet so irresolute and infirm of purpose as never to realize his aspirations, the very Hamlet of literature; Wordsworth, on the other hand, as robust in body as one of the peasants of his native Cumberland, of indomitable purpose, keeping his way right onward when made the scorn of fools, till he became the glory of his age· was no reader of books, except of the great book of Nature, and his study was on the Quantock downs." 1 Rev. W. L. Nichols. |