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Updated: June 27, 2025
I like to think of Wordsworth, an obscure, poor, perverse, absurd man, living in the corner of the great house at Alfoxden, walking in the moonlight with Coleridge, living on milk and eggs, utterly unaccountable and puerile to the sensible man of affairs, while the two planned the Lyrical Ballads.
Spalton, who knew men thoroughly and quickly appraised their individual natures, had installed Roderick in the managing end of things, there with the aid of an older head one Alfoxden, of whom Spalton made too much of a boast, telling everyone he had rescued him from a life of crime; Alfoxden, when younger, forged a check and had served his term for it.
This tendency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the two friends went together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year.
That William and Dorothy, in their poverty, should have rented so noble a country property seems at first sight inexplicable, and the contrast between Alfoxden and Coleridge's squalid pot-house in Nether Stowey can never cease to be astonishing. But the sole object of the trustees in admitting Wordsworth to Alfoxden was, as Mrs.
In July 1797 the Wordsworths removed to Alfoxden, a large house in Somersetshire, near Netherstowey, where Coleridge was at that time living. Here Wordsworth added to his income by taking as pupil a young boy, the hero of the trifling poem Anecdote for Fathers, a son of Mr. Basil Montagu; and here he composed many of his smaller pieces.
So pleasant was the companionship on both sides that, when Coleridge returned to Nether Stowey, in Somerset, Wordsworth, at his instance, changed his quarters to Alfoxden, within a mile and a half of Coleridge's temporary residence, and the two poets lived in almost daily intercourse for the next twelve months.
This is true of every part of it, of the stiff and self-sufficient preface, and of the grotesque prologue, both of which in all probability belong to 1819, no less than of the story itself, in its three cantos or parts, which bear the stamp of Alfoxden and 1798. The tale is not less improbable than uninteresting.
The careless rebuilding of the columns shows that it is not in its original position. Holford, a village 6 m. E. from Williton, at the foot of the Quantocks. Its church is picturesquely situated; in the graveyard is an old cross with a mutilated figure on the shaft. Near Holford is Alfoxden, the residence of Wordsworth in 1797, when Coleridge was at Nether Stowey. Holton, a village 2-1/2 m.
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