From this period, therefore--that is, from the year 1794-95--we may date the commencement of Wordsworth's entire self-dedication to poetry as the study and main business of his life. Somewhere about this period also (though, according to my remembrance of what Miss Wordsworth once told me, I think one year or so later) his sister joined him; and they began[116] to keep house together: once at Race Down, in Dorsetshire; once at Clevedon, on the coast of Somersetshire; then amongst the Quantock Hills, in the same county, or in that neighbourhood; particularly at Alfoxton, a beautiful country-house, with a grove and shrubbery attached, belonging to Mr. St. Aubyn, a minor, and let (I believe) on the terms of keeping the house in repair. Whilst resident at this last place it was, as I have generally understood, and in the year 1797 or 1798, that Wordsworth first became acquainted with Coleridge; though possibly in the year I am wrong; for it occurs to me that, in a poem of Coleridge's dated in 1796, there is an allusion to a young writer of the name of Wordsworth as one who had something austere in his style, but otherwise was more original than any other poet of the age; and it is probable that this knowledge of the poetry would be subsequent to a personal knowledge of the author, considering the little circulation which any poetry of a Wordsworthian stamp would be likely to attain at that time.[117] [116] I do not, on consideration, know when they might begin to keep house together: but, by a passage in "The Prelude," they must have made a tour together as early as 1787. [117] In the Memoir of Coleridge prefaced to Messrs. Macmillan's four-volume edition of his poetical works (1880) one reads:--"In the summer of 1797 Coleridge and Wordsworth, if they did not actually meet for the first time, first became familiarly acquainted with each other at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth was then in his twenty-eighth and Coleridge in his twenty-fifth year."--M.