The
original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately
Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Professor C. E.
Norton.
[334] Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never sharing, so
far as is known, the communistic dreams of his friends Coleridge and
Southey. The latter of the two had, to be sure, renounced them
shortly after his marriage, and before his acquaintance with
Wordsworth began. But Coleridge seems to have clung to them longer.
There is a passage in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but
apparently written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that
Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy.
"Wordsworth has been caballed against _so long and so loudly_ that he
has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the Allfoxden
estate to let him the house after their first agreement is expired."
Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's insulation of character and
habitual want of sympathy with anything but the moods of his own mind
that rendered him incapable of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He
appears to have regarded even his sister Dora (whom he certainly
loved as much as it was possible for him to love anything but his own
poems) as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a
mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.
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