In 1802 Lamb visited Coleridge, who was then living near Keswick, in Cumberland. For the first time in his life he beheld lakes and mountains; and the effect upon him was startling and unexpected. It was much like the impression made by the first sight of the Alps upon Leigh Hunt, who had theretofore always maintained that those merely great heaps of earth ought to have no effect upon a properly constituted mind; but he freely confessed afterwards, that he had been mistaken. Lamb had been more than once invited to visit the romantic Lake country. He had no desire to inspect the Ural chain, where the malachite is hidden, nor the silver regions of Potosi; but he was all at once affected by a desire of "visiting remote regions." It was a sudden irritability, which could only be quieted by travel. Charles and his sister therefore went, without giving any notice to Coleridge, who, however, received them very kindly, and gave up all his time in order to show them the wonders of the neighborhood. The visitors arrived there in a "gorgeous sunset" (the only one that Lamb saw during his stay in the country), and thought that they had got "into fairy-land." "We entered Coleridge's study" (he writes to Manning, shortly afterwards) "just in the dusk, when the mountains were all dark. Such an impression I never received from objects of sight, nor do I suppose I ever can again. Glorious creatures, Skiddaw, &c. I shall never forget how ye lay about that night, like an intrenchment; gone to bed, as it seemed, for the night." They went to Coleridge's house, in which "he had a large, antique, ill- shaped room, with an old organ, never played upon, an Aeolian harp, and shelves of scattered folios," and remained there three weeks, visiting Wordsworth's cottage, he himself being absent, and meeting the Clarksons ("good, hospitable people"). They tarried there one night, and met Lloyd. They clambered up to the top of Skiddaw, "and went to Grassmere, Ambleside, Ullswater, and over the middle of Helvellyn." Coleridge then dwelt upon a small hill by the side of Keswick, quite "enveloped on all sides by a net of mountains." On his return to London, Lamb wrote to his late host, saying, "I feel I shall remember your mountains to the last day of my life. They haunt me perpetually. I am like a man who has been falling in love unknown to himself, which he finds out when he leaves the lady." He soon subsided, however, into his old natural metropolitan happiness. Wordsworth was not in the Lake country when Lamb visited Coleridge; but after his return the great poet visited Charles in London, passed some time there, and then departed for Yorkshire, where he went in order to be married.