Coleridge moved up to the Lake District, and at Keswick, near where the water comes down at Lodore—­or did before the stream dried up—­he rented rooms of a kind friend by the name of Johnson, who owned Greta Hall.  Southey was writing articles for London papers.  He received a guinea a column, and when he wrote a poem, as he did every little while, he sent it to a publisher who returned him a little good cash.

Southey’s wife went up to Keswick on a visit to see her sister, Mrs. Coleridge.  Southey followed up to Keswick, and rather liked the situation.  The Southeys and the Coleridges all lived together as one happy family.

Southey was writing poetry and getting paid for it; and beside this had a small income.  Coleridge allowed Southey to buy the supplies, and when he went away on tramp lecturing tours he felt perfectly safe in leaving his family with Southey.

While up that way he met a young man, a native, by the name of Wordsworth—­William Wordsworth—­and a poet, too.

Wordsworth had a sister named Dorothy, and this brother and sister lived together in a little whitewashed stone cottage, built up against the hillside at Grasmere, a village thirteen miles from Keswick.  Coleridge liked these people first-rate and they liked him.  He used to go down to visit them, and they would all sit up late listening to the splendid talk of the handsome Coleridge.  William said he was the only great man he had ever met, and Dorothy agreed in the proposition.

Coleridge was discouraged:  the world did not care for his work, and the men in power had set their faces against him—­or he thought they had, which is the same thing.  There was a conspiracy, he thought, to keep him down; and Wordsworth should have advised him to join it, but did not.

Dorothy Wordsworth was a most extraordinary woman—­she was gentle, kind, low-voiced, sympathetic.  She was not handsome, but she had the intellect that entitled her to a membership in the Brotherhood of Fine Minds.  She knew the splendid excellence of Coleridge, and could follow him in his most abstract dissertations; and if his logic faltered she could lead him back to the trail.

Dorothy Wordsworth admired and pitied Coleridge; and from pity to love is but a step.

But Coleridge was not capable of a passionate love—­the substance of his being was all absorbed in abstract thought.  And yet Dorothy Wordsworth attracted him as no other woman ever did.  He forgot his wife, Sara, up there at Southey’s.  Sara was a better-looking woman than Dorothy, but she lacked intellect.  Her life was all bound up in housekeeping and going to church, and the petty little round of daily happenings to neighbors and friends.  The world of thought and dreams to her was nothing.  She loved her husband, but his foolish foibles vexed her, and his lack of application prompted her to chide him.  And at such times he would turn to his friends at Dove Cottage for sympathy and rest.