April 9th.--"Walked to Stowey . . . The sloe in blossom, the hawthorns
green, the larches in the park changed from black to green in two or
three days. Met Coleridge in returning."

April 12th.--" . . . The spring advances rapidly, multitudes of
primroses, dog-violets, periwinkles, stitchwort."

April 27th.--"Coleridge breakfasted and drank tea, strolled in the wood
in the morning, went with him in the evening through the wood,
afterwards walked on the hills: the moon; a many-coloured sea and sky."

May 6th, Sunday.--"Expected the painter {101} and Coleridge. A rainy
morning--very pleasant in the evening. Met Coleridge as we were walking
out. Went with him to Stowey; heard the nightingale; saw a glow-worm."


What was it which these three young people (for Dorothy certainly must
be included as one of its authors) proposed to achieve by their book?
Coleridge, in the Biographia Literaria, says (vol. ii. c. 1): "During
the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry,
the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence
to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty
by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which
accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a
known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability
of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought
suggested itself--(to which of us I do not recollect)--that a series of
poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the agents and