In April 1798 Wordsworth wrote to his friend, the Bristol bookseller: ‘You will be pleased to hear that I have gone on adding very rapidly to my stock of poetry. Do come and let me read it to you under the old trees in the park.’ Definite proposals, too, were to be made; and it was written to Cottle--this time, I think, by Coleridge--‘We deem that the volumes offered to you are, to a certain degree, one work in kind.’ That same spring, but later on, Cottle did visit Nether Stowey, and he writes of it in his own book of interesting if sometimes illegitimate gossip: ‘At this interview it was determined that the volume should be published under the title of _Lyrical Ballads_, on the terms stipulated.’ Thirty guineas seems to have been Wordsworth’s share. And, furthermore, it was settled that it should not contain the poem of ‘Salisbury Plain,’ but only an extract from it--Cottle himself, nevertheless, thought that poem the finest Wordsworth had written; that it should not contain the poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ but consist rather of shorter poems, and for the most part of pieces more recently written. ‘I had recommended two volumes,’ Cottle tells us, ‘but one was fixed on, and that to be published anonymously.’ All which speedily came about. Cottle further says, ‘The volume of the _Lyrical Ballads_ was published about midsummer, 1798.’ But it was not really till some while after midsummer, for not only were the Tintern Abbey lines, which close the little volume with so august a calm, not written till the 13th of July, but it is said expressly in Wordsworth’s _Life_ that as late as September the 13th the book was ‘printed, not published.’ Some weeks before, Wordsworth and his sister took up temporary abode in Bristol, that they might be near the printer. Then, at length, in the early part of autumn, the _Lyrical Ballads_ appeared, and Wordsworth and his sister, and Coleridge, left England for Germany.