“The Lyrical Ballads,” published in 1798, and to which Southey and Coleridge contributed, were the first poems which indicated Wordsworth’s peculiar powers and passions, and gave the first hints of his poetical philosophy, and the first startling shock to the tastes of the day. They were mostly written at Allfoxden, near the Bristol Channel, in one of the deepest solitudes in England, amid woods, glens, streams, and hills. Here Wordsworth had retired with his sister; and Coleridge was only five miles distant at Stowey. Cottle relates some amusing anecdotes of the ignorance of the country people, in regard to them, and to poets and lovers of the picturesque generally. Southey, Coleridge and his wife, Lamb, and the two Wedgewoods, visited Wordsworth in his retirement, and the whole company used to wander about the woods, and by the sea, to the great wonder of all the honest people they met. As they were often out at night, it was supposed they led a dissolute life; and it is said that there are respectable people in Bristol who believe now that Mrs. Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth were disreputable women, from a remembrance of the scandalous tattle circulating then. Cottle asserts that Wordsworth was driven from the place by the suspicions which his habits provoked, being refused a continuance of his lease of the Allfoxden house by the ignoramus who had the letting of it, on the ground that he was a criminal in the disguise of an idler. One of the villagers said, “that he had seen him wander about at night _and look rather strangely at the moon_! And then he roamed over the hills like a partridge.” Another testified “he had heard him mutter, as he walked, in some outlandish brogue, that nobody could understand.” This last, we suppose, is the rustic version of the poet’s own statement— “He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter than their own.”