At intervals during these years, there had been short excursions out of town, longer country trips, and journeys to visit friends far from London. Charles had spent a fortnight at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, in the summer of 1797, and there had made the acquaintance of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. She was, of all women he had known, Coleridge said, “the truest, most inevitable and, at the same time, the quickest and readiest in sympathy with either joy or sorrow, with laughter or with tears, with the realities of life, or the larger realities of the poets.” She formed a warm friendship for Mary, and, like her, she had clouds come over her reason, though not till very late in life. During another vacation, Lamb spent a few days with Hazlitt in Wiltshire, and in other summer holidays he visited Oxford and Cambridge. He bore the country always very bravely for the sake of the friends with whom he was staying. He had taken Mary to Margate in early years--or, maybe, she took him, for she was then twenty-six and he only fifteen--and he has told us, in “The Old Margate Hoy,” of this their first seaside experience, and how many things combined to make it the most agreeable holiday of his life. Neither of them had ever seen the sea, then, and had never been so long together alone and from home. Many years after, during his holidays, they went together again to the seaside at Brighton and at Hastings. In 1802, he was seized with a strong desire to go to remote regions, and hurried Mary off for a stay with Coleridge at the Lakes. There they passed three delightful weeks, although not in the fairy-land which their first sunset made them think they had come into. Then they had a “dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month” with the Hazlitts, at Winterslow, near Salisbury, in 1809. This visit, but not its pleasure, they repeated in the following year; and journeyed from there to Oxford, Hazlitt accompanying them, and adding to their delight in the noble university town, and in the Blenheim pictures.