What the friendship with Coleridge meant to Wordsworth may best be seen
in "The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet's Mind," Wordsworth's greatest
long poem, written some years afterwards and addressed throughout to
Coleridge.

"There is no grief, no sorrow, no despair,
No languor, no dejection, no dismay,
No absence scarcely can there be, for those
Who love as we do."

What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The
admiration which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great
preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As
a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to
Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so
noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But
Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind,
a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even
imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by
nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be
seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on
(notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy
Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with
heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think)
unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by
his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly
thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the
greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is
evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: