After taking my degree in January, 1791, I went to London, stayed there some time, and then visited my friend Jones, who resided in the Yale of Clwydd, North Wales.  Along with him I made a pedestrian tour through North Wales, for which also see the Poem.[20]

In the autumn of 1791 I went to Paris, where I stayed some little time, and then went to Orleans, with a view of being out of the way of my own countrymen, that I might learn to speak the language fluently.  At Orleans, and Blois, and Paris, on my return, I passed fifteen or sixteen months.[21] It was a stirring time.  The king was dethroned when I was at Blois, and the massacres of September took place when I was at Orleans.  But for these matters see also the Poem.  I came home before the execution of the king, and passed the subsequent time among my friends in London and elsewhere, till I settled with my only sister at Piacedown in Dorsetshire, in the year 1796.

[19] Prelude, book vi.

[20] Ibid, book xiv.

[21] This is not quite correct; the time of his absence did not exceed thirteen months.

Here we were visited by Mr. Coleridge, then residing at Bristol; and for the sake of being near him when he had removed to Nether-Stowey, in Somersetshire, we removed to Alfoxden, three miles from that place.  This was a very pleasant and productive time of my life.  Coleridge, my sister, and I, set off on a tour to Linton and other places in Devonshire; and in order to defray his part of the expense, Coleridge on the same afternoon commenced his poem of the ‘Ancient Mariner;’ in which I was to have borne my part, and a few verses were written by me, and some assistance given in planning the poem; but our styles agreed so little, that I withdrew from the concern, and he finished it himself.

In the course of that spring I composed many poems, most of which were printed at Bristol, in one volume, by my friend Joseph Cottle, along with Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and two or three other of his pieces.

In the autumn of 1798, Mr. Coleridge, a friend of his Mr. Chester, my sister, and I, crossed from Yarmouth to Hamburgh, where we remained a few days, and saw, several times, Klopstock the poet.  Mr. Coleridge and his friend went to Ratzburg, in the north of Germany, and my sister and I preferred going southward; and for the sake of cheapness, and the neighbourhood of the Hartz Mountains, we spent the winter at the old imperial city of Goslar.  The winter was perishingly cold—­the coldest of this century; and the good people with whom we lodged told me one morning, that they expected to find me frozen to death, my little sleeping room being immediately over an archway.  However, neither my sister nor I took any harm.

We returned to England in the following spring, and went to visit our friends the Hutchinsons, at Sockburn-on-Tees, in the county of Durham, with whom we remained till the 19th of December.  We then came, on St. Thomas’s Day, the 21st, to a small cottage at Town-End, Grasmere, which, in the course of a tour some months previously with Mr. Coleridge, I had been pleased with, and had hired.  This we furnished for about a hundred pounds, which sum had come to my sister by a legacy from her uncle Crackanthorp.