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friends ; for his first two sermons were two old lectures — one on the 

 Hair-powder Tax, the other on the Corn Laws. 



In April of 1796, his first volume of Poems was published; and at 

 the end of that year, having suffered much from poverty and his own 

 utter thriftlessness, he went to live at Nether Stowey, in Somersetshire, 

 in order to be near Mr. Wordsworth. At the same time a friend came 

 to live with him, and relieved him from much anxiety about money- 

 matters ; and in the following year Coleridge's best poetry was written, 

 in this quiet village home. To find how it came to be written, we must 

 go to his own account of it, which he gives so graphically in his Biographia 

 Literaria. " The first year that Wordsworth and I were neighbours," he 

 says, " our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of 

 poetry — the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader, by a faithful 

 adherence to the truth of nature ; and the power of giving the interest of 

 novelty by the modifying colour of the imagination. The thought 

 suggested itself that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. 

 In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, super- 

 natural. The excellence aimed at was to consist in interesting the 

 affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally 

 accompany the situations, supposing them real." Coleridge's share in 

 the work was to be confined to this— to pourtraying persons and 

 character supernatural, or at least romantic, so as to transfer from our 

 inward nature a human interest, sufficient to procure for these shadows 

 of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which 

 constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to 

 have this object — to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, by 

 awakening the mind from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the 

 loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. "An inexhaustible 

 treasure," says Coleridge, "but for which, in consequence of familiarity, 

 we have eyes that see not ; ears that hear not ; and hearts that neither 

 feel nor understand." Thus originated the joint volume of poems called 

 "Lyi-ical Ballads ;" and in 1798 it was published, Coleridge's contribution 

 to it being The Antient Mariner, and a few minor poems. Wordsworth 

 was so much more industrious, that his friend had not time to finish 



