Thanks partly to its remoteness from a railway, and partly also to the peculiarities of its family history, Alfoxden remains singularly unaltered.  The lover of Wordsworth who follows its deep umbrageous drive to the point where the house, the park around it, and the Quantocks above them suddenly break upon the view, sees to-day very much what Wordsworth’s visitors saw when they trudged up from Stowey to commune with him in 1797.  The barrier of ancient beech-trees running up into the moor, Kilve twinkling below, the stretch of fields and woods descending northward to the expanse of the yellow Severn Channel, the plain white facade of Alfoxden itself, with its easy right of way across the fantastic garden, the tumultuous pathway down to the glen, the poet’s favourite parlour at the end of the house—­all this presents an impression which is probably less transformed, remains more absolutely intact, than any other which can be identified with the early or even the middle life of the poet.  That William and Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so noble a country property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge’s squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never cease to be astonishing.  But the sole object of the trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs. Sandford has discovered, “to keep the house inhabited during the minority of the owner;” it was let to the poet on the 14th of July 1797.

It was in this delicious place, under the shadow of “smooth Quantock’s airy ridge,” that Wordsworth’s genius came of age.  It was during the twelve months spent here that Wordsworth lost the final traces of the old traditional accent of poetry.  It was here that the best of the Lyrical Ballads were written, and from this house the first volume of that epoch-making collection was forwarded to the press.  Among the poems written at Alfoxden Peter Bell was prominent, but we hear little of it except from Hazlitt, who, taken over to the Wordsworths by Coleridge from Nether Stowey, was on a first visit permitted to read “the sibylline leaves,” and on a second had the rare pleasure of hearing Wordsworth himself chant Peter Bell, in his “equable, sustained, and internal” manner of recitation, under the ash-trees of Alfoxden Park.  I do not know whether it has been noted that the landscape of Peter Bell, although localised in Yorkshire by the banks of the River Swale, is yet pure Somerset in character.  The poem was composed, without a doubt, as the poet tramped the grassy heights of the Quantock Hills, or descended at headlong pace, mouthing and murmuring as he went, into one sylvan combe after another.  To give it its proper place among the writings of the school, we must remember that it belongs to the same group as Tintern Abbey and The Ancient Mariner.