[Coleridge married Sarah Fricker, as we have already seen, on 5th October, 1795. The first period of Coleridge's married life had been a happy one. Although there is reason to believe Coleridge married his wife to "heal a deeper wound," and that Mary Evans would have been the object of his choice, there is no reason to suppose that he ever regretted his union with Sarah Fricker during the first years of their marriage. All accounts we have of the Clevedon and Stowey periods agree that Coleridge was happy in the new domestic bond. Cottle prints a glowing picture of the life at Clevedon (_Reminiscences_);[44] and Richard Reynell concurs regarding the Stowey cottage life (_Illustrated London News_, 1893). Coleridge, too, wrote most affectionately to his wife during his absence in Germany (_Letters_), and he was a deep lover of his children, and always in dread lest any calamity should happen to them while he was in Germany and Malta (_Letters_). Coleridge, above most men, was peculiarly fitted to make a good husband. He never spoke of his wife as his intellectual inferior, although he knew perfectly well she was not fitted to follow him in his Platonic imaginings. Dorothy Wordsworth's remarks (_Coleorton Memorials_, p. 164) on this point are beside the mark. Coleridge never expected to find in the woman he was prepared to love intellectual grasp of his philosophic system. The woman ideals he has given us are not blue-stockings, but domestic Ophelias and Imogens. Read in this connection _The Eolian Harp_ and _Lines written on having left a Place of Retirement_, _Lewti_, _Christabel_, _Love_, _Fears in Solitude_, the _Day Dream_. "I could," said Coleridge to Thomas Allsop in 1822, "have been happy with a servant-girl had she only in sincerity of heart responded to my affection." (Allsop's _Letters of S. T. Coleridge_, p. 206.) Strained relations commenced to develop between the poet and Mrs. Coleridge between the summer of 1801 and the summer of 1802; and that Coleridge was not living happily with his wife began to leak out among their acquaintances during 1802; and by 1807 it had become a recognized fact. The evidence of all this does not require to be quoted to those who have read the _Journals_ and Letters of Dorothy Wordsworth. There are numerous notices of the estrangement, and Dorothy in a letter to Lady Beaumont (_Coleorton Memorials_, i, 162), enumerates what she supposes were the causes of the gulf of separation.