What Wordsworth was to Coleridge is more important for us here. The admiration which the brilliant child of genius felt for the great preacher-poet is chiefly, one feels, an admiration for his character. As a matter of fact, Wordsworth had written nothing, up to his coming to Alfoxden, that would have preserved his name as a poet, nothing so noteworthy or promising as what Coleridge had already written. But Coleridge felt in this lean and thoughtful young man a strength of mind, a depth and sureness of heart that compelled his allegiance and even imparted, for the time, some of that resolution in which he was by nature so sadly deficient. The character of their friendship is to be seen not only in the published work of the two poets from this time on (notably in "Dejection"), but perhaps even more clearly in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and in Coleridge's letters. "I speak with heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think) unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly thought myself.... T. Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: "I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness. And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.