Matthew Arnold wrote me an interesting letter some years ago about these stanzas, from which I make the following extract: "When one looks uneasily at a poem it is easy to fidget oneself further, and neither the Wordsworth nor the Coleridge of our common notions seem to be exactly hit off in the 'Stanzas'; still, I believe that the first described is Wordsworth and that the second described is Coleridge. I have myself heard Wordsworth speak of his prolonged exhausting wanderings among the hills. Then Miss Fenwick's notes show that Coleridge is certainly one of the two personages of the poem, and there are points in the description of the second man which suit him very well. The 'profound forehead' is a touch akin to the 'god-like forehead' in the mention of Coleridge in a later poem. "I have a sort of recollection of having heard something about the 'inventions rare,' and Coleridge is certain to have dabbled, at one time or other, in natural philosophy." In 1796 Coleridge wrote to his friend Cottle from Nether Stowey: " ... I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem: ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine--then the 'mind of man'--then the 'minds of men'--in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. So I would spend ten years--the next five to the composition of the poem--and the last five to the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of the divine and rightly whispering Voice," etc. Mr. T. Hutchinson (Dublin) writes in 'The Athenaeum', Dec. 15, 1894: "I take it for granted these lines were written, not only on the fly-leaf of Wordsworth's copy of the 'Castle of Indolence', but also by way of Supplement to that poem; i. e. as an 'addendum' to the descriptive list of the denizens of the Castle given in stanzas LVII-LXIX of Canto I.; that, in short, they are meant to be read as though they were an after-thought of James Thomson's. Their author, therefore, has rightly imparted to them the curiously blended flavour of 'romantic melancholy and slippered mirth,' of dreamlike vagueness and smiling hyperbole, which forms the distinctive mark of Thomson's poem; and thus the Poet and the Philosopher-Friend of Wordsworth's stanzas, like Thomson's companion sketches of the splenetic Solitary, the 'bard more fat than bard beseems,' and the 'little, round, fat, oily Man of God,' are neither more nor less than gentle caricatures."