"I speak with heart-felt sincerity," he wrote to Cottle in June, 1797, "and (I think) unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself _a little man by his side_, and yet do not think myself the less man than I formerly thought myself....

T.Poole's opinion of Wordsworth is that he is the greatest man he ever knew; I coincide." Wordsworth's influence is evident in a letter from Coleridge to his brother George in April, 1798: "I love fields and woods and mountains with almost a visionary fondness.
And because I have found benevolence and quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I should wish to be the means of implanting it in others, and to destroy the bad passions not by combating them but by keeping them in inaction." Under the calming and clarifying influence of the stronger Northern spirit the fever of his revolutionary dreams abated, he found happiness in the conscious exercise of his poetic powers, and for one year in his troubled existence his genius showed itself in all its splendor.
The immediate poetic result of their friendship was the "Lyrical Ballads," published by Cottle in September, 1798.

The origin of the work has been described both by Wordsworth (in a prefatory note to "We Are Seven") and by Coleridge (in the _Biographia Literaria_, chap.

xiv.).

At first, they were to collaborate in writing a poem the proceeds of which should pay the expenses of a little tour they were making when the plan was thought of, in November, 1797; and thus "The Ancient Mariner" was begun.