ABSTRACT
while Scott was busy collecting the fragments of Border minstrelsy and translating German ballads,* two other young poets, far to the south, were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same years (1795–98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the phantom bark in “The Ancient Mariner.” The first fruits of these walks and talks was that epoch-making book, the “Lyrical Ballads”; the first edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by Coleridge himself in the “Biographia Literaria” (1817), Chapter XIV.
