The next morning, the “Borderers” was read, and passages from “twelve hundred lines of blank verse,--superior,” says Coleridge, in a letter to a friend, “I hesitate not to aver, to anything in our language which in any way resembles it.” “I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and I think combined judgment, when I tell you,” he elsewhere writes, “that I feel a little man by his side.” Coleridge came several times to see his big man, after this; and the two poets grew so much attached to each other, and found such profitable advantages in each other’s conversation and literary judgments, that they resolved to dwell nearer to each other. Accordingly Wordsworth and his sister went to live at Alfoxden, near Stowey, where Coleridge was residing. This was in July, 1797,--and he describes his sojourn there as a very “pleasant and productive time of his life.” The house which Wordsworth occupied belonged to Mr. St. Aubyn, who was a minor,--and the condition of occupancy seems to have been, that the poet should keep the house in repair. In one of Miss Wordsworth’s letters, dated August 14, 1797, she speaks with great enthusiasm and delight, both of the house and the country. “Here we are,” she says, “in a large mansion, in a large park, with seventy head of deer around us.... Sea, woods wild as fancy ever painted, brooks clear and pebbly as in Cumberland, villages so romantic, &c. The woods are as fine as those at Lowther, and the country more romantic; it has the character of the less grand part of the neighbourhood of the Lakes.” She then describes their “favourite parlour,” which, like that of Racedown, looks into the garden. They were three miles from Stowey, and only two from the sea. Look which way they would, their eyes were filled with beauty: smooth downs, and valleys with small brooks running down them, through green meadows, hardly ever intersected with hedges, but scattered over with trees. The hills were covered with bilberries, or oak woods. They could walk for miles over the hill-tops, which was quite smooth, without rocks.