first appeared in the _Cambridge Intelligencer_, and had been
immediately afterwards republished in a separate form as a thin quarto
pamphlet, together with some lines of no special merit "addressed to a
young man of fortune" (probably Charles Lloyd), "who abandoned himself
to an indolent and causeless melancholy." To the new edition were added
the preface already quoted from, and a prose introduction to the
sonnets. The volume also contained some poems by Charles Lloyd and an
enlarged collection of sonnets and other pieces by Charles Lamb, the
latter of whom about the time of its publication paid his first visit
to the friend with whom, ever since leaving Christ's Hospital, he had
kept up a constant and, to the student of literature, a most
interesting correspondence. [4] In June 1797 Charles and Mary Lamb
arrived at the Stowey cottage to find their host disabled by an
accident which prevented him from walking during their whole stay. It
was during their absence on a walking expedition that he composed the
pleasing lines--

"The lime-tree bower my prison,"

in which he thrice applies to his friend that epithet which gave such
humorous annoyance to the "gentle-hearted Charles." [5]

But a greater than Lamb, if one may so speak without offence to the
votaries of that rare humorist and exquisite critic, had already made
his appearance on the scene. Some time before this visit of Lamb's to
Stowey Coleridge had made the acquaintance of the remarkable man who
was destined to influence his literary career in many ways importantly,
and in one way decisively. It was in the month of June 1797, and at the
village of Racedown in Dorsetshire, that he first met William
Wordsworth.