fluenced by the growing liking for the cruder forms of romance in drama and fiction at that period. Certainly some of the action and scenery of the play recall the bugaboo terrors of Horace Walpole or Monk Lewis. This is the setting of the Fourth Act:

"A desolate prospect-a ridge of rocks-a Chapel on the summit of one-moon behind the rocksnight stormy-irregular sound of a bell-Hubert enters exhausted."

It is odd to see the good Mr. Wordsworth trying to be mysterious and creepy after this fashion. The austere and meditative young man, who never had any power to depict action or passion, living in quiet seclusion with his sister, sits down and writes with great effort a tragedy full of incredible violence from impossible motives. He had, at all events, the wisdom to recognize his failure, and kept the play in manuscript for nearly fifty years. In 1842, with something of an old man's indulgence for the failures of his youth, he included it among his other works; but few even among the lovers of the poet cared to read it.

Another poem finished at Racedown, though in great part written considerably earlier, is the Guilt

and Sorrow, a story—or rather two stories imperfectly joined of poverty, crime and repentance, told in sixty-four Spenserian stanzas. It was suggested by Wordsworth's observation of the destitution and suffering among the English humbler classes, produced by a half-century of almost continuous war. The incidents of the poem, unlike those of The Borderers, are not improbable and all within the range of Wordsworth's natural sympathies. But it is not very well constructed, and its pathos is too sordid and pitiless. The effect of the poem is depressing. Wordsworth published only about a third of it in 1798, under the title, The Female Vagrant, though the whole, he says, was already written. Successive additions and alterations were made in after years, until it appeared in its present form in the edition of 1842.

In a third long poem of this period Wordsworth found, perhaps for the first time, a congenial theme. The story of Margaret, or, as he first called it, The Ruined Cottage, begun at Racedown, was continued and enlarged two years later at Alfoxden, but did not take its present form until incorporated into the First Book of The Excursion, 1814. It was this poem in its earliest form which Coleridge when he

had read it in the manuscript, declared "to be supreme, I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which in any way resembles it." Certainly the Margaret of The Excursion is one of Wordsworth's most pathetic and lovely characters, showing that calm patience, that union of gentleness and strength, which always appealed to his sympathy.

In June, 1797, the quiet of Racedown was enlivened by a most remarkable visitor. One of the very few readers who could discover genius in Wordsworth's early verse came to Dorsetshire to find the new poet. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Never visitor who could better inspire a poet! For those were the days of Coleridge young, full of all high imaginings, with gift of converse like an angel, and of power to make the most abstruse philosophy sound musical as Apollo's lute. The young poets spent most of two days in reading aloud to each other their unpublished verse for mutual encouragement. "The first thing Coleridge read after he came," writes Dorothy, "was William's new poem The Ruined Cottage, with which he was much delighted; and after tea he repeated to us two acts of his tragedy Osorio. The next morning William

read his tragedy, The Borderers." The visit seems to have instantly aroused in Coleridge an extravagant admiration for his new friend. In a letter written next day he avers that he feels himself a little man by his side; Wordsworth's big tragedy "is absolutely wonderful," with profound touches of the human heart, such as are found three or four times in Schiller's Robbers, "but in Wordsworth there are no inequalities. T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew I coincide." Coleridge's enthusiasm soon cooled enough to permit a more discriminating estimate of Wordsworth and his poetry; but this meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship of great profit to both. Coleridge was then living in the little village of Nether Stowey on the edge of the Quantock hills in the adjoining county of Somersetshire. The Wordsworths visited him there very shortly after his return from Racedown; and learning that Alfoxden, a spacious country mansion in the neighborhood at that time vacant, was to be let at a moderate price, they took it, and at once removed thither. Before the middle of July, 1797, they were settled in Alfoxden House, and a new period in their life had begun.

CHAPTER III

ALFOXDEN AND GRASMERE

HE scenery about Wordsworth's new resi

TH

dence was all a poet could desire. Dorothy writes in her Journal, “There is everything here; sea, woods as wild as fancy ever painted, brooks. clear and pebbly as in Cumberland; villages so romantic." The few lovers of Wordsworth who visit that region to-day find it hardly altered since the poet was there. In front of Alfoxden House the ground rises in a gentle succession of hills until you catch a glimpse of the sea some miles away. In the rear of the house and sweeping round one side of it is a reach of noble forest. The path to Nether Stowey, on the other side, leads through a wooded park and along a shaded glen where the summer silence is broken only by the tinkle of a brook that plays hide-and-seek among the trees till it slips over a tiny fall. This dell was a favorite haunt of Wordsworth and his sister; it was here that, one