Early life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge lost to Virtue". In the letter, Coleridge attacks Southey for causing the divide between the two of them and for pursuing money instead of their beliefs. Coleridge's and Southey's relationship dissolved, and Coleridge was without a close friend. However, he met William Wordsworth, a fellow poet, in September 1795 and would eventually become close with him. Their relationship did not yet start, and in January 1796 Coleridge was travelling to find subscribers for a proposed political magazine called "The Watchman". During this time, he met with Erasmus Darwin and discussed both politics and religion; Darwin's atheism bothered Coleridge but he
William Wordsworth long supposed that Wordsworth relied chiefly on Coleridge for philosophical guidance, but more recently scholars have suggested that Wordsworth's ideas may have been formed years before he and Coleridge became friends in the mid-1790s. In particular, while he was in revolutionary Paris in 1792, the 22-year-old Wordsworth made the acquaintance of the mysterious traveler John "Walking" Stewart (1747–1822), who was nearing the end of his thirty years of wandering, on foot, from Madras, India, through Persia and Arabia, across Africa and Europe, and up through the fledgling United States. By the time of their association, Stewart had published an ambitious