ABSTRACT

one wintry evening, a hundred and forty years ago, a party of friends, deeply attached to each other, was gathered round the fire at a farmhouse near Coleorton, in Leicestershire. There were present William Wordsworth and his family, his sister Dorothy, his wife’s sister, Sarah Hutchinson, Coleridge, and Coleridge’s son, Hartley. To this group Wordsworth read, for the first time, his great poem on “the growth of an individual mind”, as he then described it. Everyone present was deeply moved … Coleridge so much so that he retired to his room and in the middle of the night composed those lines beginning: O Friend! O Teacher! God’s great gift to me! Into my heart have I received that Lay More than historic, that prophetic Lay Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright) Of the foundations and the building up Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell What may be told, to the understanding mind Revealable …