and Wordsworth, Coleridge expresses unbounded admiration and affection for his friend. After speaking of some plan for their future habitation in neighbourhood to each other, "I am sure I need not say," he writes, "how you are incorporated into the better part of my being; how, whenever I spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side."

The following discussion concerning German hexameters, in two of Coleridge's letters, is interesting in itself, and introduces expressions of strong attachment to Wordsworth and his sister:

"With regard to measures, I am convinced that our language is, in some instances, better adapted to these metres than the German: e. g. 'a' and 'the' are better short syllables than 'ein' and 'der;' 'not' than 'nicht.' Is the German, in truth, adapted to these metres? I grievously suspect that it is all pure pedantry. Some advantages there, doubtless, are, for we cannot fall foul of any thing without advantages."

And in another letter he writes:

"As to the German hexameters, they have in their very essence grievous defects. It is possible and probable that we receive organically very little pleasure from the Greek and Latin hexameters; for, most certainly, we read all the spondees as iambics or trochees. But then the words have a fixed quantity. We know it; and there is an effect produced in the brain similar to harmony without passing through the car-hole. The same words, with different meanings, rhyming in Italian, is a close analogy. I suspect that great part of the pleasure derived from Virgil consists in this satisfaction of the judgment. 'Majestate

manûs' begins an hexameter; and a very good beginning it is. Majestate magnâ' is read exactly in the same manner, yet that were a false quantity; and a schoolmaster would conceit that it offended his ear. Secondly, the words having fixed quantities in Latin, the lines are always of equal length in time; but in German, what is now a spondee is in the next line only two-thirds of a dactyl. Thirdly, women all dislike the hexameters with whom I have talked. They say, and in my opinion they say truly, that only the two last feet have any discernible melody; and when the liberty of two spondees, 'Jovis incrementum,' is used, it is absolute prose.

"When I was ill and wakeful, I composed some English hexameters :

William, my teacher, my friend! dear William and dear Dorothea!

Smooth out the folds of my letter, and place it on desk or on table;

Place it on table or desk; and your right hands loosely half 1-closing,

Gently sustain them in air, and extending the digit didactic,

Rest it a moment on each of the forks of the five-forked

left hand,

Twice on the breadth of the thumb, and once on the tip of

each finger;

Read with a nod of the head in a humouring recitativo; And, as I live, you will see my hexameters hopping before

you.

This is a galloping measure; a hop, and a trot, and a

gallop!

All my hexameters fly, like stags pursued by the stag

hounds,

Breathless and panting, and ready to drop, yet flying still onwards.

I would full fain pull in my hard-mouthed runaway hunter; But our English Spondeans are clumsy yet impotent curbreins;

And so to make him go slowly, no way have I left but to lame him.

William, my head and my heart! dear Poet that feelest and thinkest !

Dorothy, eager of soul, my most affectionate sister!

Many a mile, O! many a wearisome mile are ye distant, Long, long, comfortless roads, with no one eye that doth know us.

O! it is all too far to send to you mockeries idle :

Yea, and I feel it not right! But O! my friends, my

beloved!

Feverish and wakeful I lie, I am weary of feeling and thinking.

Every thought is worn down,—I am weary, yet cannot be

vacant.

Five long hours have I tossed, rheumatic heats, dry and flushing,

Gnawing behind in my head, and wandering and throbbing

about me,

Busy and tiresome, my friends, as the beat of the boding night 2-spider.'

"I forget the beginning of the line:

my eyes are a burthen, Now unwillingly closed, now open and aching with dark

ness.

O! what a life is the eye! what a fine and inscrutable

essence!

1 "Still flying onwards," were perhaps better.

2 False metre.

Him that is utterly blind, nor glimpses the fire that warms

him;

Him that never beheld the swelling breast of his mother; Him that ne'er smiled at the bosom as babe that smiles in

its slumber;

Even to him it exists, it stirs and moves in its prison;

Lives with a separate life, and "Is it the spirit?" he mur

murs:

Sure, it has thoughts of its own, and to see is only its language.'

"There was a great deal more, which I have forgotten, as I never wrote it down. No doubt, much better might be written; but these will still give you some idea of them. The last line which I wrote I remember, and write it for the truth of the sentiment, scarcely less true in company than in pain and solitude:

William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea!

You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you!""

CHAPTER XV.

66

RETURN TOWARDS ENGLAND.- COMMENCEMENT OF THE PRELUDE."

In the beginning of 1799, Wordsworth and his sister were preparing to leave Goslar, which they quitted on the 10th February of that year.

He felt inspirited by the change of place. When he set forth from this imperial city, so dull and dreary as it had been to him, and when the prospect of a transition from its frost and snow to a more genial climate opened upon him, he seemed to be like one emancipated from the thraldom of a prison: it gave new life and alacrity to his soul. He had been composing Minor Poems; but he now projected something of a higher aim, and more comprehensive scope. He was about to enter his thirtieth year. It was time that he should ascertain for himself whether he was justified in choosing a poet's life as a profession; he would, therefore, make some serious essay, for the purpose of testing his own strength. What should be the argument? After much consideration, he chose his own intellectual being as his subject, "The growth of his own mind." He would review his own metaphysical history, from infancy through boyhood, school time, and college life: his travels, his hopes and aspirations, his disappointments and distresses, his inward conflicts and perplexities, the restoration of health and freshness to a disordered and drooping imagination — these should be the topics