The Wordsworth residence at Alfoxden lasted only about one year. As a tenant, he was regarded with suspicion, not only because of his habit of wandering round and muttering to himself, but because he was so continually surrounded by groups of persons who talked of queer and mysterious things. The trustees of the property terminated the lease, and in June, 1798, the Wordsworths left Alfoxden, spending one week with Coleridge in Nether-Stowey, another in Bristol with the publisher Cottle, arranging details for the forthcoming "Lyrical Ballads." They then started for that ramble along the Wye in which the " Lines on Tintern Abbey" took shape, and of which Wordsworth said: “No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol." In September, the trio of friends decided to spend the Winter in Germany. The object of Coleridge was to learn the German language; of Wordsworth to study natural history. His interest in science, at this time, seems to have been very great, and to have continued for several years. He was one of the first to foresee what has since come to pass, the time when what is now called science shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood." 66 The poems written during the stay of about five months in Germany show that his thoughts often turned to his native land. But perhaps the most significant event was that here he resolved to make a searching review of his mental history from his youth to the present moment, in order to determine whether he was fitted to devote himself to poetry. The poem now begun was not published until the year after his death, when it was brought out by Mrs. Wordsworth and named by her " The Prelude." His reasons should silence those who criticise it as the work of a selfconceited man: my hope has been that I might fetch |