The retreat where "apple-trees in blossom made a bower," and where he so often "slept himself away," was evidently the same as that described in the poem The Green Linnet:
'Beneath these fruit-tree boughs that shed
Their snow white blossoms on my head.'
On the other hand, the "low-hung lip" and "profound" forehead of the other, the "noticeable Man with large grey eyes," mark him out as S. T. C.; "the rapt One, of the god-like forehead," described in the Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg. The description "Noisy he was, and gamesome as a boy," is verified by what the poet and his wife said to Mr. Justice Coleridge in 1836. In addition, Mr. Hutchinson of Kimbolton tells me he "often heard his father say that Coleridge was uproarious in his mirth."
Matthew Arnold wrote me an interesting letter some years ago about these stanzas, from which I make the following extract:
"When one looks uneasily at a poem it is easy to fidget oneself further, and neither the Wordsworth nor the Coleridge of our common notions seem to be exactly hit off in the Stanzas; still, I believe that the first described is Wordsworth and that the second described is Coleridge. I have myself heard Wordsworth speak of his prolonged exhausting wanderings among the hills. Then Miss Fenwick's notes show that Coleridge is certainly one of the two personages of the poem, and there are points in the description of the second man which suit him very well. The profound forehead is a touch akin to the god-like forehead in the mention of Coleridge in a later poem.
"I have a sort of recollection of having heard something about the inventions rare, and Coleridge is certain to have dabbled, at one time or other, in natural philosophy."
In 1796 Coleridge wrote to his friend Cottle from Nether Stowey:
" ... I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem: ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science. I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—then the mind of man—then the minds of men—in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories. So I would spend ten years—the next five to the composition of the poem—and the last five to the correction of it. So would I write, haply not unhearing of the divine and rightly whispering Voice," etc.
Mr. T. Hutchinson (Dublin) writes in
The Athenæum
, Dec. 15, 1894:
"I take it for granted these lines were written, not only on the fly-leaf of Wordsworth's copy of the Castle of Indolence, but also by way of Supplement to that poem; i. e. as an addendum to the descriptive list of the denizens of the Castle given in stanzas LVII-LXIX of Canto I.; that, in short, they are meant to be read as though they were an after-thought of James Thomson's. Their author, therefore, has rightly imparted to them the curiously blended flavour of romantic melancholy and slippered mirth, of dreamlike vagueness and smiling hyperbole, which forms the distinctive mark of Thomson's poem; and thus the Poet and the Philosopher-Friend of Wordsworth's stanzas, like Thomson's companion sketches of the splenetic Solitary, the bard more fat than bard beseems, and the little, round, fat, oily Man of God, are neither more nor less than gentle caricatures."