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360 The river with its mountain boundary, the winter sun, and the summer paradise of myrtle and orange trees entranced him with their ever-increasing attractions. "I would gladly live and die here," he exclaimed; but his literary plans operated to counteract any such inclinations, and he became anxious with the help of English libraries to digest and arrange the profuse materials he had been so diligently collecting. Coleridge had taken up his abode at Keswick, and his thoughts turned to a home near his friend. The distance, however, from Bristol and London, the two foci of his publishing interests weighed with him against such a decision, and he turned a wistful eye to Allfoxen in Somersetshire, where Wordsworth had resided. In June (1801) he returned to England and proceeded direct to Bristol. His friends were gratified by his altered appearance; his health was re-established, and the nervous symptoms induced by a sedentary life and excessive task-work of the brain, had been dispelled by change of climate, and the vicissitudes of travel.

Coleridge invited him to Greta Hall, and sent him the following description of the place which, after his many and uncertain wanderings; eventually became his fixed and permanent home. "Our house stands on a low hill, the whole front of which is one field, and an enormous garden, nine-tenths of which is a nursery garden. Behind the house is an orchard, and a small wood on a steep slope, at the foot of which flows the river Greta, which winds round and catches the evening lights in the front of the house. In front we have a giant's camp—an encamped army of tent-like mountains, which by an inverted arch gives a view of another vale. On our right the lovely vale and the wedge-shaped Lake of Bassenthwaite, and on our left Derwentwater and Lodore full in view, and the fantastic mountains of Borrodaile. Behind us is the