philosophy: even as for Wordsworth it might symbolize the distinction of two kinds of poetry, the poetry of nature and of artifice. But in the facts themselves, in the experiences which set them thinking, their diverse points of view found a common ground. And of these facts the most salient were nature's immutable appeal to man and man's ever-varying response to nature. 'My own conclusions on the subject,' says Coleridge, 'were made more lucid by Mr. Wordsworth by many happy instances drawn from the operation of natural objects on the mind."1 From the cast or state of mind, to which such objects make no appeal except as mere objects of experience,2 through the intermediate stage in which they move us by the suggestion of incidental resemblances, up to the highest mode of their operation, in which they take the impress of human emotion and thought-for the due appreciation of these diverse attitudes of the mind to nature Coleridge was indebted to Wordsworth and Wordsworth's sister, whose eye was ever 'watchful in minutest observance of nature'. The various problems thus forced upon his mind contributed to heighten the general state of spiritual unrest which possessed him on the eve of his departure for Germany. But for a while at least he was able to forget his speculations in the distraction of foreign travel.

II. GERMANY.

'Our object,' wrote Wordsworth of the projected visit to Germany, 'is to furnish ourselves with a tolerable stock of information in natural science.' But Coleridge anticipated something more valuable. 'A more thorough revolution (he tells us) in my philosophical principles, and a deeper

1 Biog. Lit. i. 64.

2

A primrose by a river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more.-Peter Bell, Pt. I. 3 Biog. Lit. i. 137.

insight into my heart, were still wanting'; and it was doubtless the sense of these deficiencies which turned his thoughts to Germany. In August 1798 he writes to Poole, 'I look upon the realization of the German scheme as of great importance to my intellectual activity, and, of course, to my moral happiness.' Whether or not it is to be regretted that Coleridge should ever have become acquainted with German philosophy, is matter of opinion: but it seems at least necessary to insist upon two important facts in connexion with this supposed crisis in his mental life. The first is, that he was a metaphysician long before he studied the German philosophers; and the second, that it was in obedience to, and not in defiance of, his better instincts that he first devoted himself to that study. The first outcome, however, of his sojourn in Germany was a more or less entire abandonment of his speculations. 'Instead of troubling others with my own crude notions I was thenceforward better employed in attempting to store my own head with the wisdom of others.' His earliest efforts, 'after acquiring a tolerable sufficiency in the German language,' were directed towards a grounded knowledge of German philology and literature. For this purpose he studied carefully the elder writers of the language, and their successors up to the period of Lessing. To his actual contemporaries Coleridge seems to have devoted less attention. Goethe, now nearing the height of his fame, was practically neglected by him: even for Schiller his enthusiasm must have been on the wane, for his subsequent translation of Wallenstein, as he himself was careful to point out, by no means implied an admiration of this or any other product of the German drama. Lessing's genius, however, Coleridge at once recognized; and he was so far impressed by it that he conceived, and for some time prosecuted with all earnestness, the plan of a biography of the great critic. For this purpose he made an extensive

collection of material and imbibed the spirit of Lessing's critical doctrines. To these doctrines Coleridge's own obligation has-especially as regards Shakespeare-in all probability been overestimated, at least in Lessing's own country. It cannot indeed be doubted that both as a mental discipline and as a training in critical method, the study of Lessing was of the highest value to Coleridge. To some extent Lessing may be said to have carried on the work which Boyer had begun. But all that Coleridge had to learn from Lessing was quickly learnt; and the abandonment of the projected life was probably not more due to vacillation of purpose than to his loss of interest in the subject itself.

Although during his residence in Germany Coleridge was chiefly occupied in the accumulation of material for future use, his mind was not, even then, wholly unexercised in original thought. Indeed, his later letters home show that he could rarely hold himself for long from speculation on his favourite topics. Discussions, too, there were no doubt in plenty. In Göttingen Coleridge argued with the rationalizing Eichorn on Christian evidences, until the latter 'dreaded his arguments and his presence'; and his friends in Germany 'lamented the too abstruse nature of his ordinary speculations'. But as yet, although visions of a magnum opus were already floating before his mind, he postponed deliberately any attempt to systematize his theories. At the end of his visit he writes to Josiah Wedgwood, 'I shall have bought thirty pounds worth of books, chiefly metaphysics, and with a view to the one work to which I hope to dedicate in silence the prime of my life.' These books were dispatched to England, to be there perused as opportunity allowed. And the opportunity did not come at once. With the works of the German philosophers, according to the Biographia Literaria, Coleridge for the greater part became familiar at a far

later period.'1 Even of Kant no regular study was as yet undertaken. The actual fruits of the visit to Germany were a command of the language and an acquaintance with the nation's genius in its language and literature.

III. KESWICK.

Coleridge left Germany in July, 1799. Almost exactly a year later he entered his new home at Keswick and resumed his intimacy with Wordsworth. During the intervening year two tasks had absorbed his energiesthe political contributions to the Morning Post and the translation of Wallenstein. This latter work he describes as a 'soul-wearying labour', and to it in after years he ascribed his inability to finish Christabel. Whatever the cause may have been, the vein of poetry which flowed so abundantly at Stowey had now almost run dry. For a long time the efforts to resume Christabel proved fruitless, and when at length the impulse came, it was inadequate to the completion of the poem. To this inertness of the poetic faculty was joined a strange indifference to the beauties of nature. In a letter to Josiah Wedgwood (written during a visit to London in 1801) he complains of 'a total inability to associate any but the most languid feelings with the Godlike objects' which had lately surrounded him and the mood which he here chronicles was of frequent occurrence. The same causes (the chief among them being, doubtless, ill-health and growing domestic discord) which clouded his imagination, drove him to concentrate his whole energies on philosophy. His first task was to reconsider thoroughly his own speculative standpoint: and the result, a definite abandonment of empiricism, whether sceptical or dogmatic. In a series of letters to the same friend (written early in the year 1801) he criticizes severely the philosophy of Locke; and in March

1 Biog. Lit. i. 141.

3

of the same year he writes to Poole, 'I have not only entirely extricated the notions of time and space, but have overthrown the doctrine of association, as taught by Hartley, and with it all the irreligious metaphysics of modern infidels-especially the doctrine of necessity.'1 Coleridge's final abandonment of Hartley's system has been attributed to the influence of Kant; but this letter, written as it was when Coleridge was only beginning his serious study of Kant, forbids such a conclusion. It is probable indeed that the conviction which it records had been long maturing in his mind. Even before he left England there had dawned upon him, as we have seen, a certain 'guiding light', in his growing sense of the limitations of the unaided intellect. To this ever deepening insight, the systems of the intellect had themselves contributed, through their evident contradiction of his own experience. For in that experience he had been made conscious that the most genuine apprehension of reality is of the nature of a direct intuitional act, to which thought and emotion are alike indispensable, in which they are indeed inseparably blended. And this consciousness had grown clearer as the years advanced. 'My opinion is,' he writes in March of this year, 'that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling; and that all truth is a species of Revelation.' Hence his distrust, now definitely formulated, of any system which ignores the essential

1 Letters, i. 348.

2 See Note to Letters, i. 351. Leslie Stephen grounds his conclusion on the (unprinted) letters to Josiah Wedgwood, in which Coleridge 'still sticks to Hartley and the Association doctrine'. Apparently, then, Coleridge's final emancipation was the result of that spell of 'most intense study' during the early days of March (Letters, i. 348).

As early as 1796, he had publicly expressed his sense of the inadequacy of the 'mechanical philosophy'. See foot-note to lines contributed to Southey's Joan of Arc (quoted in Cottle's Early Recollections of S. T. Coleridge, ii. 242).