The following year he married Miss Sara Fricker. This important step was taken on the strength of a small sum promised by a bookseller for a volume of poems which he was then writing. A month later his friend Robert Southey--afterwards well known as an author--married his wife's sister. Some time before this, the two young men had conceived the idea of crossing the sea with a few congenial acquaintances and forming an ideal community on the bank of the Susquehanna. Fortunately the scheme was abandoned and the two dreamers turned their attention to literary projects. Coleridge's best work as a poet was done in 1797 and 1798, and probably the inspiration came largely from his friendship with William Wordsworth. During these two years the poets lived near each other in the beautiful Cumberland country, and while taking long rambles over the Quantock Hills they talked, planned, and wrote. The first result of this intercourse was a joint volume of poems called _Lyrical Ballads_, published in 1798. This included Coleridge's _Ancient Mariner_ and Wordsworth's _We are Seven_. About the same time Coleridge wrote the first part of _Christabel_, the ode _France_, _Kubla Khan_, and a few other well-known poems. The impression which he made at this period of his life upon Dorothy Wordsworth, the poet's sister, was recorded by her in a letter. She says of him: "He is a wonderful man. His conversation teems with soul and mind. . . . His eye is large and full, and not very dark but gray, such an eye as would receive from a heavy soul the dullest expression; but it speaks every emotion of his animated mind; it has more of the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling than I ever witnessed. He has fine dark eyebrows and an overhanging forehead."