To recall a little the origin of the book--the circumstances under which Wordsworth and Coleridge planned and produced it. It was in the Nether Stowey and Alfoxden time, when the men were neighbours, three miles of green Somerset country dividing the home of Coleridge from the home of Wordsworth. I saw the place--that is, the neighbourhood, and Coleridge’s home--a few years since, much in that summer weather which tempted their own more prolonged wanderings, which followed them in that excursion to ‘Linton and the Valley of Stones,’ which was the first cause, Wordsworth says, of the issue of _Lyrical Ballads_. Plain living and high thinking they practised then, and from necessity as much as from choice. A yeoman of Somerset would hardly have lived at that time--and certainly he would not live to-day--in the cottage which was Coleridge’s. Straight from the country road you step to its door: in an instant you are in the small square parlour, with large kitchen-like fireplace, with one, or, I think, two small windows, and a window-seat from which, on days of evil weather, the stay-at-home commanded the prospect of the passing rustic as he walked abroad--perhaps of the occasional traveller on his way to the village inn. But generally, fair weather or foul, the spectacle was scanty--time was marked by shifting light and changes in the colour of the sky, or by the movements of beasts at milking-time, or at hours of rest and of labour. Never, I should say, was one hour merely frittered away by either the poet who lived or the poet who visited in that humble cottage. Never a call of ceremony: an interview that bears no fruit--a social necessity, the continual plague of cities. Never an hour that did not tell in some way, by active work, or by ‘wise passiveness,’ upon the mind that was to be cultivated and the character that was to be developed. Such a life, led not in actual isolation, but in narrowed and selected companionship, was perhaps about the best preparation men could make for work of the concentrated and the self-possessed power of the ‘Ancient Mariner,’ and of the serene profundity of the lines connected with Tintern Abbey. This was the place, and these were the conditions, for the quietude of life and thought felt as the greatest necessity of existence by Wordsworth, ‘a worshipper of Nature,’ ‘unwearied in that service.’