He was a tall, dingy man, in whom length was so predominant over breadth, that he might almost have been borrowed for a foundry poker! Oh, that face!--I have it before me at this moment. The lank, black, twine-like hair, pinguinitescent, cut in a straight line along the black stubble of his thin, gunpowder eyebrows, that looked like a scorched aftermath from a last week’s shaving. His coat-collar behind, in perfect unison, both of colour and lustre, with the coarse yet glib cordage which I suppose he called his hair, and which, with a bend inward at the nape of the neck--the only approach to flexure in his whole figure--slunk in behind his waistcoat; while the countenance, lank, dark, very hard, and with strong, perpendicular furrows--gave me a dim notion of some one looking at me through a gridiron,--all soot, grease, and iron.’ This thoroughbred lover of liberty, who had proved that Mr. Pitt was one of the horns of the second beast in the ‘Revelations’ that spake as a dragon, nevertheless declined to take ‘The Watchman’; and in short, after a disastrous career, that serial died a natural death. The disappointed editor took refuge, for a brief season, with Mr. Poole, at Stowey, and there, for the first time, he met Wordsworth, who then resided about twenty miles off, at Racedown, in Dorsetshire. “Coleridge returned for a short time to Bristol, but in January, 1797, he removed to Stowey, where he rented a small cottage. This must have been a pleasant episode in the lives of the gifted individuals whom it brought together in that sweet village. Wordsworth, who was now twenty-seven, had come with his sister to Alfoxden, which was within two miles of Stowey. Charles Lloyd, a young man of most sensitive and graceful mind, and of great poetical susceptibility, resided in the family with Coleridge. Charles Lamb, then in the spring-time of his life, was also a frequent inmate; and often afterwards, under the cloud which lowered over his noble devotedness in London, his fancy wandered back to that happy valley.--Why, says he to Charles Lloyd, who unexpectedly looked in upon him in the great Babylon: ‘Why seeks my Lloyd the stranger out? What offering does the stranger bring Of social scenes, home-bred delights, That him in aught compensate may For Stowey’s pleasant winter nights, For loves and friendships far away?’ The Pantisocratist, George Burnet, was also a visitor. Mrs. Coleridge herself had a poetical taste, and there is one very graceful piece of hers written on the receipt of a thimble from her kind friend Mr. Cottle. Just such a thimble, sings Sarah Coleridge--