re and
philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth. He
disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet
Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the romanticist Buerger
above both Goethe and Schiller.

It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was
pre-eminently the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation,
that the new German thought found its way into England. During the
fourteen months which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and
Goettingen--he had familiarized himself with the transcendental
philosophy of Immanuel Kant and of his continuators, Fichte and
Schelling, as well as with the general literature of Germany. On his
return to England, he published, in 1800, a free translation of
Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his writings, and more especially
through his conversations, he became the conductor by which German
philosophic ideas reached the English literary class.

Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a bookworm and a
day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though
unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his
native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in
the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at
Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose
industry supported both families. During his last nineteen years
Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of
Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England
were accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's wonderful talk. Talk,
indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his
generation. It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper. His
_Table Talk_--crowded with pregnant paragraphs--was taken down from his
lips by his nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shakspere are
nothing but notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures
delivered before the Royal Institute, and never fully written out.
Though only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most
penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticisms in English. He was always
forming projects and abandoning them. He projected a great work on
Christian philosophy, which was to have been his _magnum opus_, but he
never wrote it. He projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. "I
schemed it at twenty-five," he said, "but, alas! _ventur