Of his political, religious, and literary opinions at this time he has left a fairly adequate account in his published writings and his correspondence, especially in the _Biographia Literaria_ and in the letter to the Rev. George Coleridge referred to above. The first year of his married life saw him still, in spite of the failure of Pantisocracy, an eager visionary reformer upborne by generous enthusiasm and ardent religious feeling. "O! never can I remember those days," he wrote in the _Biographia_, "with either shame or regret. For I was most sincere, most disinterested! My opinions were indeed in many and most important points erroneous; but my heart was single. Wealth, rank, life itself, then seemed cheap to me, compared with the interest of (what I believed to be) the truth, and the will of my Maker." However much he may have consorted with unbelievers like Thelwall and distressed his good brother George by his heterodoxy, he was by nature deeply religious. He tried in his letters to recover Thelwall from his "atheism," though he heartily approved a sentiment expressed by the latter: "He who thinks and _feels_ will be virtuous; and he who is absorbed in self will be vicious, whatever may be his speculative opinions." Godwin's system of "Justice," with its soulless logic, he abhorred. He preached often in Unitarian churches. To young Hazlitt, who heard him preach in January, 1798, from the text "And He went up into the mountain to pray, _Himself, alone_," it seemed "as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe." In politics he was, when he went to Stowey, "almost equidistant from all the three prominent parties, the Pittites, the Foxites, and the Democrats"; he was "a vehement anti-ministerialist, but after the invasion of Switzerland, a more vehement anti-Gallican [see the last two stanzas of "France"], and still more intensely an anti-Jacobin." Under Wordsworth's influence his thoughts turned in great measure from contemporary politics to more fundamental matters. Always his poetry had been the utterance of his essential being. "I feel strongly and I think strongly," he wrote to Thelwall in 1796, "but I seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness and passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings." Wordsworth gave his feelings a new object and his philosophy a higher aim. In April of the second year at Stowey, in the letter to his brother already quoted, Coleridge wrote: "I have for some time past withdrawn myself totally from the consideration of _immediate causes_, which are infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general causes, the 'causae causarum.' I devote myself to such works as encroach