SOURCE: "Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge: From 1807 to 1830," in Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets, 1839. Reprint by J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1907, pp. 189-201.

In this essay De Quincey offers his reflections on the personalities of Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and compares their poetic styles and philosophical views.

A circumstance which, as much as anything, expounded to the very eye the characteristic distinctions between Wordsworth and Southey, and would not suffer a stranger to forget it for a moment, was the insignificant place and consideration allowed to the small book-collection of the former, contrasted with the splendid library of the latter. The two or three hundred volumes of Wordsworth occupied a little, homely, painted bookcase, fixed into one of two shallow recesses, formed on each side of the fireplace by the projection of the chimney in the little sitting-room up-stairs, which he had already described as his half kitchen...