’Down would he sit; and without strength or power
  Look at the common grass from hour to hour,’

are aptly illustrated by such passages in his sister’s Journal, as the following, of 29th April 1802: 

“We went to John’s Grove, sate a while at first; afterwards William lay, and I lay in the trench, under the fence—­he with his eyes closed, and listening to the waterfalls and the birds.  There was no one waterfall above another—­it was a kind of water in the air—­the voice of the air.  We were unseen by one another.”

Again, April 23rd,

  “Coleridge and I pushed on before.  We left William sitting on the
  stones, feasting with silence.”

And this recalls the first verse of ‘Expostulation and Reply’, written at Alfoxden in 1798;

  ’Why, William, on that old grey stone,
  Thus for the length of half a day,
  Why, William, sit you thus alone,
  And dream your time away?’

The retreat where “apple-trees in blossom made a bower,” and where he so often “slept himself away,” was evidently the same as that described in the poem ‘The Green Linnet’: 

  ’Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
  Their snow white blossoms on my head.’

On the other hand, the “low-hung lip” and “profound” forehead of the other, the “noticeable Man with large grey eyes,” mark him out as S. T. C.; “the rapt One, of the god-like forehead,” described in the ‘Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg’.  The description “Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy,” is verified by what the poet and his wife said to Mr. Justice Coleridge in 1836.  In addition, Mr. Hutchinson of Kimbolton tells me he “often heard his father say that Coleridge was uproarious in his mirth.”

Matthew Arnold wrote me an interesting letter some years ago about these stanzas, from which I make the following extract: 

“When one looks uneasily at a poem it is easy to fidget oneself further, and neither the Wordsworth nor the Coleridge of our common notions seem to be exactly hit off in the ‘Stanzas’; still, I believe that the first described is Wordsworth and that the second described is Coleridge.  I have myself heard Wordsworth speak of his prolonged exhausting wanderings among the hills.  Then Miss Fenwick’s notes show that Coleridge is certainly one of the two personages of the poem, and there are points in the description of the second man which suit him very well.  The ‘profound forehead’ is a touch akin to the ’god-like forehead’ in the mention of Coleridge in a later poem.

  “I have a sort of recollection of having heard something about the
  ‘inventions rare,’ and Coleridge is certain to have dabbled, at one
  time or other, in natural philosophy.”

In 1796 Coleridge wrote to his friend Cottle from Nether Stowey: