is a woman, indeed,” said Coleridge, “in mind I mean, and heart; for her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, you would think her rather ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary woman, you would think her pretty.”  To the solidity, sense, and strong intelligence of the Wordsworth stock she added a grace, a warmth, a liveliness peculiarly her own.  Her nature shines transparent in her letters, in her truly admirable journal, and in every report that we have of her.  Wordsworth’s own feelings for her, and his sense of the debt that he owed to her faithful affection and eager mind, he has placed on lasting record.

The intimacy with Coleridge was, as has been said, Wordsworth’s one strong friendship, and must be counted among the highest examples of that generous relation between great writers.  Unlike in the quality of their genius, and unlike in force of character and the fortunes of life, they remained bound to one another by sympathies that neither time nor harsh trial ever extinguished.  Coleridge had left Cambridge in 1794, had married, had started various unsuccessful projects for combining the improvement of mankind with the earning of an income, and was now settled in a small cottage at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, with an acre and a half of land, from which he hoped to raise corn and vegetables enough to support himself and his wife, as well as to feed a couple of pigs on the refuse.  Wordsworth and his sister were settled at Racedown, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire.  In 1797 they moved to Alfoxden, in Somersetshire, their principal inducement to the change being Coleridge’s society.  The friendship bore fruit in the production of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, mainly the work of Wordsworth, but containing no less notable a contribution from Coleridge than the Ancient Mariner.  The two poets only received thirty guineas for their work, and the publisher lost his money.  The taste of the country was not yet ripe for Wordsworth’s poetic experiment.

Immediately after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two Wordsworths and Coleridge started from Yarmouth for Hamburg.  Coleridge’s account in Satyrane’s Letters, published In the Biographia Literaria, of the voyage and of the conversation between the two English poets and Klopstock, is worth turning to.  The pastor told them that Klopstock was the German Milton.  “A very German Milton indeed,” they thought.  The Wordsworths remained for four wintry months at Goslar, in Saxony, while Coleridge went on to Ratzeburg, Goettingen, and other places, mastering German, and “delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic depths.”  Wordsworth made little way with the language, but worked diligently at his own verse.

When they came back to England, Wordsworth and his sister found their hearts turning with irresistible attraction to their own familiar countryside.  They at last made their way to Grasmere.  The opening book of the Recluse, which is published for the first time in the present volume, describes in fine verse the emotions and the scene.  The face of this delicious vale is not quite what it was when