Coleridge and Thelwall had corresponded since April 1796, and in July 1797 Thelwall's walking tour through the west country of England brought him to Nether Stowey, where he arrived on 17 July. For ten days Thelwall, Coleridge, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth (recently settled at Alfoxden House) formed a ‘most philosophical party’ walking in the Quantock coombs. They read Wordsworth's play The Borderers in Alfoxden Park, and enjoyed a high-spirited dinner at which an informer, the servant Thomas Jones, was also present. The conversation was reported and, within a few days, Thelwall's old adversary James Walsh—Coleridge's ‘Spy Nosy’—arrived at Stowey, only to find that Thelwall had already left.
Thelwall, impressed by Coleridge's and Wordsworth's life of literary retirement, hoped to settle at Stowey too. But, like the poets, he had not forgotten politics entirely: in Coleridge's well-known anecdote, Thelwall claimed that the Quantocks was ‘a place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!’ (S. T. Coleridge, Table Talk, 1, 24 July 1830, 181). Seemingly embarrassed by Thelwall's notoriety, and anxious to consolidate his friendship with the Wordsworths, Coleridge put him off. Thelwall eventually settled with his family at a farm in Llys-wen, on the banks of the River Wye, near Brecon. Thelwall took Coleridge’s advice and subsequently commenced a life of farming and literary composition, describing himself as the ‘new Recluse’.
In 1801 Thelwall published his Poems Chiefly Written in Retirement, including one conceived whilst visiting Coleridge at Stowey, the blank verse ‘Lines Written at Bridgwater’.