ns, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste: for
this nobler taste would have been mere apery. The busy, anxious,
money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not
have enjoyed the simplicity of Nature. The mind begins to love Nature by
imitating human conveniences in Nature; but this is a step in intellect,
though a low one--and were it not so, yet all around me spoke of
innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with
unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the busy,
anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg. In this charitable and
_catholic_ mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city. These are huge
green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the
interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace. Of my return I have
nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which
answers to posting in England. These north German post chaises are
uncovered wicker carts. An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a
_chef d'oeuvre_ of mechanism, compared with them: and the horses!--a
savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration
table. Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown
rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the
horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.
Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the
objects in search of which I loft you: namely, the _literati_ and
literature of Germany.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W----
and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the
poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate. It is
one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they looked,)
with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the windows,
beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several
roads. Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet's eyes at
present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation. We waited a
few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the figures of two
of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from
Klopstock's odes.[225]

[225] 'There is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias,'
says Mr. Carlyle, 'which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct
truer than his philosophy is. Neither has the still purer spir