Page:Osorio; a tragedy, as originally written in 1797 (IA cu31924105501831).pdf/13



the summer of 1797 two of the greatest of modern English poets, Coleridge and Wordsworth, met for the first time at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Wordsworth was in his twenty-eighth and Coleridge in his twenty-fifth year, in the spring-tide of his creative faculty. He had come over on a visit to Wordsworth from Nether-Stowey in Somersetshire, where he had been engaged in writing the tragedy of Osorio. Wordsworth was also occupied with a tragedy, The Borderers, which was completed in the following November, offered to the managers of Covent Garden Theatre, and summarily rejected by them, and which only saw the light forty-five years afterwards.

The story of the fortunes and misfortunes of Coleridge's Osorio, with which alone we are concerned here, will take longer to tell.