Two people were coming down Coleridge's garden,--a "gaunt and Don-Quixote-like" man in striped pantaloons and a brown fustian jacket, and a slender, pleasing, dark-haired woman in her early twenties. They were William and Dorothy Wordsworth: names dearer than any to the contemplative heart of Coleridge. For nearly a year they had been tenants of Alfoxden Manor-house, about a mile away among the hills: for nearly a year they had been his constant companions, his solace, his inspiration. To their example and society he owed, as he allowed, the awakening and consummation of his genius: for although the "magic and melody" of his verse were all his own,--that magic unsurpassed and unsurpassable, "altogether beyond price," and that melody, Such a soft floating witchery of sound As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy Land, Where melodies round heavy-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor push, hovering on untam'd wing! (_The Eolian Harp_) yet it was Wordsworth who had helped him to "find himself," and it was Dorothy whose influence on both men called out their best and deepest. "Three people but one soul," Coleridge had called this ideally-united trio of himself and his friends; and as "three people with one soul," they "walked on seaward Quantock's heathy hills," and had every thought in common. "We are off for a long walk this lovely noon," explained Dorothy, "and taking our lunch with us: will you come, Mr. Coleridge?" A very hasty wash and brush, and a hurried goodbye to Sara, and the poet had forsaken a distasteful employment for a singularly congenial one. Over the hills and far away, he could postpone for the nonce every workaday question which troubled him, and, deep in the abstrusest consideration of poetry, or speculation of philosophy, could steep himself in the calm which was his ultimate desire. He had a host of projects to discuss. He had planned, in collaboration with Wordsworth, a "great book of Man and Nature and Society, to be symbolized by a brook in its course from upland source to sea:" much on the lines of his own strophe from the German: Unperishing youth! Thou leapest from forth The cell of thy hidden nativity; Never mortal saw The cradle of the strong one; Never mortal heard The gathering of his voices; The deep-murmur'd charm of the son of the rock, That is lisped evermore at his slumberless fountain. There's a cloud at the portal, a spray-woven veil At the shrine of his ceaseless renewing; It embosoms the roses of dawn, It entangles the shafts of the noon, And into the bed of its stillness The moonshine sinks down as in slumber, That the son of the rock, that the nursling of heaven May be born in a holy twilight!