A little later, we find him in his own West of England again, at Bristol--whither we have wandered so often in search of poets--and he encounters Southey thereabout, whom he had met for the first time on a visit to Oxford in 1794; this brother poet being as hazy, and dreamy, and theosophic, and hopeful in those days as Coleridge himself. The two form a sort of garret partnership--lecture to the savages of surrounding towns--are inoculated both with the {312} "fraternity and equality" fever which had grown out of the French Revolution--they believing that this French car of Juggernaut is to be dragged with its bloody wheels over the whole brotherhood of nations. In this faith they plot a settlement, in the new region--of which they know nothing, but the sweetly sounding name of Wyoming--upon the banks of the Susquehanna. There they would dig, and build cottages, and philosophize, and found Arcadia. With kindred poetic foresight, Coleridge marries in these days a bride as inexperienced and as poor as himself; and for a little time there is a one-volumed Arcadia on the banks of the Bristol Channel, with a lovely and pensive Sara for its presiding nymph. Only for those few early years does this nymph enter for much into the career of Coleridge. Domesticity[4] was never a {313} shining virtue in him; and wife, and cottage, and Arcadia somehow fade out from the story of his life--as pointless, unsaving, and ineffective for him, all these, as the blurred lines with which we begin a story, and cross them out. Southey, with a practical old aunt to look sharply after his youngness, is quickly driven from his Arcadian feeding ground and for the present disappears. But Coleridge is still in the wallow of his wild vain hopes and wild discourse, when he encounters another poet--his elder by a few years and of a cooler temperament--William Wordsworth; who about that time had established himself, with his sister Dorothy, upon the borders of Somersetshire. These two men, so unlike, cleave together from the beginning; there is a flagging now in the Unitarian discourses of Coleridge in country chapels; and instead, wanderings with the brother poets over the fair country ways that border upon the Bristol straits--looking off upon the green flats of Somerset, the tufted banks of the Avon, the shining of the sea, with trafficking ships, to the west. Out of these, and of their meditations grow the first book--a joint one--of {314} _Lyrical Ballads_; its issue not making a ripple on the tide where Crabbe and Cowper were then afloat; and yet creating an epoch in the history of British verse. For in it was the story of the Ancient Mariner, and words therein that will never grow old: "Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou wedding guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast; He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us He made and loveth all!"