It is a region little known, untrodden by the foot of the tourist, and untroubled by the presence of the railIt is a pretty and romantic district, all verdure in summer, a corner of the beautiful island where old-fashioned inns, and grandfathers' clocks, and village greens, and cackling geese can still be found a peaceful, quiescent country, where the cottage gardens exhibit all the richest profusion, all the brightest glories of Flora's train-where the hay wagons creep leisurely along the deep, leafy lanes where the stranger sees The dull mechanic passing to and fro, where it is still possible to enjoy The sleep which is among the lonely hills, of which Wordsworth was so fond-and where the disturbing influences and the busy hum of men seldom or never succeed in penetrating. Externally the Quantocks to-day wear very much the same aspect that they wore one hundred years ago, when the country side had not yet recovered from the first shock of the French Revolution, when rumors of invasion by our neighbors across the Channel were creating sore consternation in British homes, and men's hearts were failing them for very fear. Time, we constantly hear it said, works miracles. So far as towns and cities are concerned the remark is true enough, and few or none will be inclined to dispute it. But in rural coverts and benighted districts, far removed from the humanizing influences of modern civilization, the case is different. Changes then progress only by slow degrees. Though the schoolmaster has been abroad for the last twenty years or more, and has filled the heads of young men and maidens throughout the land with knowledge that their grandfathers would have regarded as the exclusive possession of the Enemy of Mankind; though steam and the railroad have robbed our popular mythology of elves and goblins, witches and sorcerers; though timely and beneficent legislation has effaced many paralyzing influences, we are not speaking out of due bounds when we say that it would be an easy matter today to find hereabouts those who are confirmed believers in the mysteries of the black art, in the machinations of brownies, witches and elves, and in the power of the evil eye. Nor, after all, can we wonder that illiterate villages should not rise superior to such ideas when similar ones are entertained by those cultivated persons who compose the Society for the Promotion of Psychical Research. In the vicinity of this secluded region there is a little town which has gone for centuries by the name of Nether Stowey, and, though little among the cities of the plain and the thousands of Judah, has a remembrance which shall not perish from the earth so long as English poetry shall endure. Nestling quite at the foot of the Quantocks, and in close proximity to the fine scenery both of Porlock and Linton, Stowey is but little visited by the outside world. It is a sleepy, overgrown village, consisting of a few houses and farms, and laborers' cottages, clustering round its ancient church, with some outlying houses and homesteads. A century since, Stowey was indeed one of the most retired villages of England, not of a mountainous district. No turnpike road ran through the parish. It lay in the line of no thoroughfare. The only inhabitants of education were the parson, who was probably a man of great simplicity, and a tanner named Thomas Poole, strongly imbued with literary tastes. The villagers were illiterate to an extent which is quite the exception in these days, and few of them ever went twenty miles from the place. Altogether the parish was fully half a century behind the rest of the world, and furnished recollections and traditions of rural people, of manners and intelligence, dating back to the second half of the seventeenth century. Many old men could still remember the Restoration of Charles II., the apostasy of James II., Monmouth's rebellion, Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes, the landing of the Prince of Orange at Torbay, to say nothing of more recent events, such as the campaigns of Marlborough, the ris ing of the Young Pretender, and the signal discomfiture of the old one. The inhabitants of Nether Stowey were indeed a very primitive race, and afforded many indications of unmitigated ignorance pari passu with the full exercise of the more violent and vindictive passions of human nature. In short, they possessed the simplicity, though not the virtues, of Arcadia. We have said that the only person of intelligence in Stowey besides the vicar was Thomas Poole, who followed the vocation of a tanner. He was a native of Stowey, having been born there in November 1765, as we are informed by Mrs. Sandford, of Chester, in her very charming biography of this worthy man, published in 1888.* While his brothers were sent to be educated at Blundell's Foundation School at Tiverton, in the adjoining county of Devon, which in the second half of the eighteenth century was regarded as the foremost grammar school in the West of England, Tom Poole was supplied with only the rudiments of learning, and in 1791 settled quietly down to the tanning business at Stowey, but not allowing that business wholly to engross his attention. The times were indeed stirring times. Old things were passing away, and the dawn of most momentous changes was breaking. In France the Revolution had burst forth in all its fury. Nor was it long before its principles began to find sympathizers on British soil, though the majority regarded them with undisguised horror. Tom Poole, having examined the question, made up his mind that the Revolution was almost inevitable in the circumstances, and as he was "not the person to preserve an unpopular opin ion, or to be silent when any one of his cherished ideals were attacked or misrepresented," we may be quite sure that he did not always find it easy to live in peace with his neighbors. We are told that after Tom Paine had published his famous " Rights of Man," in answer to Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," the same thing happened to Poole that had happened in the ages long ago to Ishmael, the son of Hagar. *See Thomas Poole and his Friends, 2 vols. Macmillan, His hand was against every man's hand, and every man's hand was against his hand. Tom Poole still further displayed his contempt for the conventional tones of thought and feeling by appearing in public without a cocked hat, and without a grain of powder in his hair. Matters went on from bad to worse until, as Mrs. Sandford tells us, the small world of Stowey and Bridgwater made no secret that it was very much shocked, and at times almost inclined to believe that Tom Poole ought to be denounced as a public enemy. In 1794 Poole met Coleridge and Southey, who were both young men, both fervent sympathizers with the Revolution, both brimming over with the ardor of young converts. To Coleridge Poole took a fancy at once. Coleridge had come to Bristol for the first time to join Southey, Lovell, Burnett, and other young enthusiasts who wished to carry into practical execution a wild scheme which the mys tical Coleridge, fresh from the University of Cambridge, had denominated by the outlandish appellation of Pantisocracy or Asphetism, but which would be more correctly described by the name "Nephelo-coccygia. This "fire-new" project, although it occupied and unsettled the minds of those who were responsible for its projection for the space of nearly two years, was anything but original, as social schemes seldom are. Many of our readers will remember that the melancholy Abraham Cowley more than a century previously had resolved to retire with his books to a lodge in some wilderness on the other side of the Atlantic, and that centuries previously the philosopher Plotinus, in the most corrupt age of the Roman Empire, had entreated the Emperor Gallienus to give him a deserted town in Campania, in order that he might colonize it with philosophers, and so exhibit to an admiring world, and above all to the remotest posterity, the grand spectacle of a school of the sages, and show how joyful and pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity. The Pantisocratists, however, wished to realize a different ideal. To migrate to the wilds of the Susquehanna; to work hard; to rise up early; to take rest late; to eat the bread of carefulness, and above all else, to solace their leisure hours by the composition of epic poems destined, in their own opinions, if not in those of others, to hand down their names to an imperishable immor tality-such were the plans which this courageous band had the spirit to form. And why was it that their gigantic visionary scheme was not realized? Merely for the lack of the necessary funds. Money was wanted, and money could not be had. One by one the projectors forsook the society of each other. Robert Southey married a wife, left her at the church door, and then started for Portugal. Coleridge, highly offended, retired to the North. Lovell and Edmund Seward, Southey's friends, took ill and died. But we are digressing. In the winter of 1796 Thomas Poole, of Nether Stowey, who had not lost sight of that "noticeable man with the large gray eyes," Samuel Taylor Coleridge, tried to induce him to take up his abode at Stowey. Having found a small house, the rent of which was only seven pounds a year, Poole secured it for Coleridge and bade him come. Still dreaming of Pantisocracy and its attendant manual labor, Coleridge came to Stowey in the Christmas week of 1796. For Coleridge throughout life the planning of schemes was simply Paradise, and the execution of them simply Purgatory. His visions, it has been well said, resemble those gorgeous palaces of architectural students who give scope to their fancies because they are incapable of realization. Coleridge would have uttered half a dozen epic poems in prose over his after-dinner wine, or his afternoon tea. But the misfortune was that when his head had apparently executed all that it could execute, his right hand would invariably forget its cunning. The mould might be ready, the metal might be bubbling over in the furnace, and yet Coleridge would have been incapable of running off the one into the other. The house in which Coleridge fixed his residence at Stowey was able cottage," and is now transformed into an inn, and greatly increased in size.* The cottage in Coleridge's time, * A medallion which has lately been affixed we are told, consisted of two small and rather dark little parlors, one on each side of the front door, looking straight into the street. In the rear was a small kitchen, entirely lacking in modern conveniences, and necessitating the kindling of a fire, when such a luxury was required, on the hearth. Above these were probably no more than four sleeping apartments. By the back door the inmates obtained access to a long strip of kitchen garden, through which communication was obtained with that of Thomas Poole, which ran down from another part of Nether Stowey into the same lane. In this retreat, despite many inconveniences, Coleridge and his wife and child contrived to make themselves very comfortable. He had married a wife-Miss Sara Fricker-in 1795, and of this union there were as yet only one child, a son, named Hartley, after David Hartley, for whose philosophy Coleridge's admiration was unbounded. On March 26th, 1797, the poet could write of his retreat in the following strain : Beside one friend Beneath the impervious covert of one oak, I've raised a lowly shed, and know the names Of husband and of father; not unhearing Of that divine and nightly. whispering voice Which, from my childhood to maturer years, Spake to me of predestinated wreaths Bright with no unfading colors. in the same year, saying: "We are very happy, and my little David Hartley grows a sweet boy.... I raise potatoes, and all manner of vegetables; have an orchard; and shall raise corn (with the spade) enough for my family. We have two pigs, and ducks and geese. To his friend John Thelwall he wrote A cow would not answer to keep; for we have whatever we want from T. Poole." The poet, however, lay under obligations to Tom Poole other than those of milk. Among these were Tom Poole's company, the run of his house, and of his quiet bookroom upstairs, and the jasmine arbor in the garden, a particular, romantic spot which Coleridge designated his "Elysium." At Stowey, in 1797, Coleridge was visited by some notable friends who were seeking rest and change, both of notifies the fact that it was once the residence of Coleridge. осса which they found in profusion. Thither, not long after that domestic tragedy which so saddened their lives, came Charles and Mary Lamb, and thither at a subsequent date came William Hazlitt, fresh from dwelling with Mesech and having his habitation among the tents of Kedar. Charles Lloyd, the son of a wealthy Birmingham banker, and a poet of no ordinary calibre, was another of Coleridge's visitors. At Stowey Lloyd composed a dramatic poem of considerable merit, entitled "The Duke D'Ormond," and published, in conjunction with Charles Lamb, in 1797, a volume of sonnets and other poems, besides a translation of the comedies of Vittorio Alfieri. Southey was only an sional visitor to Stowey, coming over now and then from Bristol or Buriton, near Christchurch. On one occasion, in a letter to a friend dated August 20th, 1799, Southey says: "I write to you from Stowey, and at the same table with Coleridge. . . . I have been some days wholly immersed in conversation. In one point of view Coleridge and I are bad companions for each other. Without being talkative I am conversational, and the hours slip away, and the ink dries upon the pen in my hand." Coleridge was busying himself with French and German literature, and contributing revolutionary essays to journals addressed in "The New Morality," as "Couriers" and "Stars," sedition's evening host, Thou *6 Morning Chronicle" and "Morning Post." The month of June 1797 was destined to be a very noteworthy one in the life of Coleridge. It was in that month that the poet met Wordsworth and his sister at Racedown in Dorsetshire. While yet a Cambridge undergraduate, Coleridge had been struck by the poetic instinct which Wordsworth had manifested in his "Descriptive Sketches," and their meeting was mutually satisfactory. Coleridge invited Wordsworth and his sister to visit him at Stowey, and his invitation was accepted. For more than a fortnight the visitors sojourned at Stowey, highly gratified with the enchanting scenery, and Coleridge's delightful society. Miss Dorothy Wordsworth, the accomplished sister of the poet, has thus described the attractions of the spot, as they were seen on their first arrival: "There is everything here; the sea; woods wild as fancy ever painted; and William and I, in a wander by ourselves, found out a sequestered waterfall in a dell formed by steep hills covered by full grown timber trees. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand parts of the lakes. From the end of the house we have a fine view of the sea over a woody country; and exactly opposite the window where I now sit is an immense wood whose round top has the appearance of a mighty dome. A quarter of a mile from the house is the waterfall of which I spoke." We may mention that it was by the side of this waterfall that Wordsworth composed his "Lines in Early Spring," in our judgment one of the sweetest of his lyrical compositions: I heard a thousand blended notes in While in a grove I sat reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. Hard by lies a dell which is now known as Wordsworth's Glen," because it was a favorite rendezvous of the two poets and their friends. During this memorable sojourn Wordsworth and his sister, a wander by ourselves," found their way into the coomb or dell, spoken of above, and following the course of a brook they pursued their way to a spot, about two miles distant, called Allfoxden or Alfoxton, so delightful that they were forced to indulge in "dreams of happiness in a little cottage, and passing wishes that such a place might be found out." Some days afterward they discovered that Alfoxden Hall was to let. The rent was nominal, and the Wordsworths agreeing to become the tenants, took up their abode there with Basil Montagu, a child of great promise of whom they were then taking charge. "The house," says Dorothy Wordsworth, "is a large mansion with furniture enough for a dozen families like ours. The garden is at the end of the house and our favorite parlor looks that way. . . . The front of the house is to the south, but it is screened from the sun by a high hill which rises immediately from it. This hill is beautiful, scattered irregularly with trees, and topped with fern. . . . Wherever we turn we have woods, smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them; the hills that cradle these valleys are either covered with fern and bilberries or oak woods, which are cut for charcoal. . . Walks extend for miles over the hilltops, the great beauty of which is their wild simplicity: they are perfectly smooth, without rocks." It was in this rural paradise that he who was destined hereafter, in the Victorian age, to wear the laureate's bays now settled down. He saw much of Coleridge, who occasionally officiated in a Unitarian pulpit at Bridgwater and Taunton, in the neighborhood, and was writing a tragedy called " Osorio," which he had undertaken at the request of Sheridan. Wordsworth and his sister kept much to themselves. The poet was shy, reserved, given to self-introspection, and to communing with Nature. The tendency of his mind was strongly speculative and metaphysical, and though he wrote a tragedy at Alfoxden, it was unworthy of his great powers. If the good folk of Stowey were disturbed by the presence of Coleridge, Poole, and Wordsworth, three deep sympathizers with revolutionary doctrines, how much more must they have been disturbed by the presence of John Thelwall, who honored Stowey with his presence in the summer of 1797? Thelwall was a proscribed, a hunted fugitive. By the skin of his teeth, as Job says, he had escaped the terrible ordeal of a State trial for treason in 1794. Weary of earth and laden with care, he sought some solitude, some place to live and die unseen. He came to Stowey at Coleridge's invitation, and the uneasiness created by his visit was so great that the Government of the day, of which Pitt was the head, dispatched a spy to keep a watch upon Wordsworth's doings. Coleridge was a married man well known to his neighbors in Stowey. Wordsworth was a bachelor, unknowable. Coleridge would talk. Wordsworth would cast an impenetrable ægis around himself. What he with great felicity said of Milton was equally applicable to himself: "His soul was like a star and dwelt apart." Thelwall was still a pariah. It was whispered that he often found his way to the secluded retreat at Alfoxden, and uttered "things" enough to make all good Tories quake in their shoes. At length Mrs. St. Albyn, the owner of Alfoxden, interposed. She had heard, she informed Wordsworth by letter, unpleasant rumors respecting her tenants, and felt obliged to give them notice to quit. Vain was it for Tom Poole to write to her in favor of Wordsworth's respectability, and to emphasize the fact that one of his uncles was a Tory, and above all a Canon of Windsor, that he was a man fond of retirement--fond of reading and writing-and that he had never had above two gentlemen at a time with him. All this was of no avail with the scandalized Tory lady. And so they were forced to say farewell to Alfoxden. The inoffensive sister and the inoffensive brother, he who could say of himself :To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, even he had to depart. This, however, did not take place until June, 1798, and in the interim one of the finest pieces in the English language was written, "The Ancient Mariner." In the autumn of 1797, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Poole went on a walking expedition from Alfoxden to Porlock, Linton, and Lynmouth. On the road Coleridge related a remarkable dream which had been dreamed by John Cruikshank, a resident of Nether Stowey, and which he had been thinking of making the subject of a poem. As the trio walked on the subject was worked out. Coleridge suggested that an ancient mariner should be punished for some crime by ghostly hauntings. Wordsworth, who had been perusing Shelvocke's " Voy. ages," published in 1726, and had been struck by the author's description of the albatross, then suggested to Coleridge that his ancient mariner should kill one of these birds, and be punished for his cruelty by the tutelary spirits of the region in which the act was perpetrated. And so originated "The Ancient Mariner," that weird poem the merits of which many of our readers, we doubt not, will have been slow to ap |