“A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed, by the side of my sister, in our lodgings at a draper’s house, in the romantic imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz Forest. In this town the German emperors of the Franconian line were accustomed to keep their court, and it retains vestiges of ancient splendour. So severe was the cold of this winter that when we passed out of the parlour warmed by the stove, our cheeks were struck by the air as if by cold iron. I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a pelisse lined with fur, and a dog-skin bonnet, such as was worn by the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts, in a sort of public ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I consequently became much attached to it.” During these walks he composed the ‘Poet’s Epitaph.’ His ‘Poem of Ruth,’ ‘The Address to the Scholars of a Village School,’ ‘The two April Mornings,’ ‘The Fountain,’ ‘A Conversation,’ ‘Matthew,’ and a variety of others were likewise written about this time. In his correspondence with Coleridge at this time, the latter speaks in terms of the highest affection for him. ‘I am sure I need but say,’ he writes, ‘how you are incorporated with the better part of my being; how whenever I spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side.’” On the 10th of February, 1799, Wordsworth and his sister left Goslar, and returned towards England. The poet was now nearly thirty years of age; and as the gates of the Imperial City closed behind him, he felt like a bird suddenly released from captivity, and resolved to build up some stately architecture of verse, which men would not willingly let die. Accordingly he commenced the “Prelude,” within the very hum of the city. Six out of the fourteen books which compose it, were written before 1805. In the spring of 1799 the poet and his sister returned to England; and in a letter to Cottle, written immediately after their arrival, we find them in “the county of Durham, just on the borders of Yorkshire,” thankful, after sufficient experience of Germany, for the dear face of old England once more. GRASMERE.