The cottage at Nether Stowey occupied by Coleridge, from 1797 to 1800, stands at the further end of the village, and is, indeed, the last house on the Minehead road. It duly bears an ornamental tablet proclaiming the fact of the poet’s residence here in those critical years. Sentiment, however, is not a little dashed at finding the house to be an extremely commonplace one; now, owing to a succession of alterations, enlarged and made to look like an exceedingly unattractive specimen of a typical suburban “villa” of the first half of the nineteenth century, when stucco was rampant and red brick had not come into vogue. A scheme appears at the present time to be under contemplation by which the house is to be purchased and presented to the nation, as a memorial of the poet. It is to become something in the way of a “Coleridge Reading Room,” or Village Institute; but at the moment of writing, it is a lodging-house. A few years ago it was the “Coleridge Cottage” inn. Such have been the varied fortunes of this home, for those short four years, of “the bright-eyed Mariner,” as Wordsworth calls him. When it is further said that a storey has been added to the house, and that the thatch of Coleridge’s time has been replaced by pantiles, it will be considered, perhaps, that the value of it as a literary landmark can be but small. Coleridge himself had no love for it, as may be seen in his later references to Nether Stowey, in which he refers to it as a “miserable cottage,” and “the old hovel.” But the years he passed in this place were the most productive of his career. It was while walking along the hills to Watchet, that he composed “The Ancient Mariner” and the first part of “Christabel.” Close at hand, at Alfoxden, was Wordsworth, poetising on primroses and the infinitely trivial; and at Stowey itself was the amiable Thomas Poole, literary and political dilettante, friend and host of this circle in general. Southey sometimes came, and friends with visionary schemes for the regeneration of the social system, then in some danger of being overturned, following upon the popular upheaval of the French Revolution, severely exercised the conventional minds of the local squires and farmers with their unconventional ways and rash speech.