The house in which Thomas Poole used to live, and where Coleridge and his friend had a second home, is about the center of the village. It is a large, old-fashioned house, with pleasant garden, and ample farmyard, with paddocks behind. It is now inhabited by a medical man and his sister, who do all honor to the memory of Coleridge, and very courteously allow you to see the house. The lady obligingly took me round the garden, and pointed out to me the windows of the room overlooking it, where so many remarkable men used to assemble. Mr. Poole, who was a bachelor and a magistrate, died a few years ago, leaving behind him the character of an upright man, and a genuine friend to the poor. On his monument in the church is inscribed, that he was the friend of Coleridge and Southey. The cottage inhabited by Coleridge is the last on the left hand going out toward Allfoxden. It is now, according to the very common and odd fate of poets' cottages, a Tom and Jerry shop. Moore's native abode is a whisky-shop; Burns's native cottage is a little public-house; Shelley's house at Great Marlowe is a beer-shop; it is said that a public-house has been built on the spot where Scott was born, since I was in that city; Coleridge's house here is a beer-shop. Its rent was but seven pounds a-year, and it could not be expected to be very superb. It stands close to the road, and has nothing now to distinguish it from any other ordinary pot-house. Where Coleridge sat penning the Ode to the Nightingale, with its "Jug, jug, jug, And that low note more sweet than all;" which the printer, by a very natural association, but to his infinite consternation, converted into "Jug, jug, jug, And that low note more sweet than ale;" sat, when I entered, a number of country fellows, and thought their ale more sweet than any poet's or nightingale's low notes. Behind the house, however, there were traces of the past pleasantness, two good, large gardens, and the old orchard where Coleridge sat on the apple-tree, "crooked earthward;" and while Charles Lamb and his sister went to ascend the hills and gaze on the sea, himself detained by an accident, wrote his beautiful lines, "This Lime-tree Bower, my prison," including this magnificent picture:--