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and Thomas Wedgwood, enabled him in the autumn of 1798 to visit Germany, to pursue his studies, according to his own plan. He was accompanied by Wordsworth. As our wish is to make this sketch of his life as autibiographical as possible, we extract from his Biographia Literaria the account of his voyage and some of the incidents of the tour.

"On Sunday morning, September 16th, 1798, the Hamburg packet set sail from Yarmouth; and I, for the first time in my life, beheld my native land retiring from me. At the moment of its disappearance—in all the kirks, churches chapels, and meeting houses, in which the greater number, I hope, of my countrymen were at that time assembled, I will dare question whether there was one more ardent prayer offered up to heaven, than that which I then preferred for my country. Now then (said I to a gentleman who was standing near me) we are out of our country. 'Not yet, not yet!' he replied, and pointed to the sea; This, too, is a Briton's country.' He, after giving an amusing account of his fellow-passengers, says, that "on the second day, at four o'clock I observed a wild duck, a single solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words."

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He arrived at Hamburg on Wednesday the 19th of September: on landing, Wordsworth set out in search of an hotel, and he to deliver his letters of recommendation. The narrative proceeds: "I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by any thing I actually

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saw, as by the confused sense that I was, for the first time in my life, on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I began to wonder at all things, some for being so like, and some for being so unlike the things in England. Dutch women with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind.-The women of Hamburg, with caps plaited on the caul with silver or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled through it. -The Hanoverian women, with the fore part of the head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall, perpendicular on the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon, which lies or tosses on the back. The ladies, all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth; which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too glossy motherof-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the laughing, loud-talking, country women and servant girls, who with their clean white stockings, and with slippers without heel-quarters, tripping along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm for the dirt; with a lightness, too, which surprised me, who had always considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an inn, that I had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; and to my English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street, some in the ordinary triangular form and entire, as the botanists say, but the greater number notched and scol

loped with more than Chinese grotesqueness.-Through streets and streets I passed on as happy as a child, and I doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes, amused by the wicker waggons with moveable benches across them, one behind the other, (these were the hackney-coaches); amused by the signboards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion (a useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations); amused with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every entrance and exit; and finally, amused by looking in at windows, as I passed along, the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing cards, and the gentlemen all smoking."

Shortly after this time he had an interview with Klopstock. He says, "Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as Wordsworth 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. The poet entered. I was much disappointed in his countenance, and recognized in it no likeness to the bust. There was no comprehension in the forehead, no weight over the eyebrows, no expression of pecularity, moral or

intellectual in the eyes, no massiveness in the general countenance. He is, if any thing, rather below the middle size. He wore very large half-boots which his legs filled, so fearfully were they swoln. However, though neither Wordsworth nor myself could discover any indications of sublimity or enthusiasm in his physiognomy. We were both equally impressed with his liveliness, and his kind and ready courtesy. He talked in French with my friend, and with difficulty spoke a few sentences to 'me in English. His enunciation was not in the least affected by the entire want of his upper teeth. The conversation began on his part by the expression of his rapture at the surrender of the detachment of French troops, under General Humbert. Their proceedings in Ireland, with regard to the committee which they appointed, with the rest of their organized system, seemed to give the poet great entertainment. He then declared his sanguine belief in Nelson's victory, and anticipated its confirmation with a keen and triumphant pleasure. His words, tones, looks, implied the most vehement antiGallicanism. The subject changed to literature, and I inquired in Latin concerning the history of German poetry, and the elder German poets. To my great astonishment he confessed that he knew very little on the subject. He had, indeed, occasionally read one or two of their elder writers, but not so as to enable him to speak of their merits. Professor Ebeling, he said, would probably give me every information of this kind; the subject had not particularly excited his curiosity. He then talked of Milton and Glover, and thought Glover's blank verse superior to Milton's. Wordsworth and myself expressed our surprise; and my friend gave his definition and notion of harmonious verse; that it consisted (the English iambic blank verse above all) in the apt arrange

ment of pauses and cadences, and the scope of whole paragraphs,

-' with many a winding bout

Of linked sweetness long drawn out.'

and not in the even flow, much less in the prominences or antithectic vigour of single lines, which were indeed injurious to the total effect, except where they were introduced for some specific purpose. Klopstock assented, and said that he meant to confine Glover's superiority to single lines. He told us he had read Milton in a prose translation when he was fourteen. I understood him thus myself, and Wordsworth interpreted Klopstock's French as I had already construed it. He appeared to know very little of Milton-or indeed of our poets in general. He spoke with great indignation of the English prose translation of his Messiah. All the translations had been bad, very bad-but the English was no translation-there were pages on pages not in the original, and half of the original was not to be found in the translation. Wordsworth told him, that I intended to translate a few of his odes, as specimens of German lyrics; he then said to me in English, 'I wish you would render into English some select passages of the Messiah, and revenge me of your countrymen!' It was the liveliest thing which he produced in the whole conversation. He told us that his first ode was fifty years older than his last. I looked at him with much emotion-I considered him as the venerable father of German poetry; as a good man; as a Christian; seventy-four years old, with legs enormously swoln, yet active, lively, cheerful, and kind and communicative. My eyes felt as if a tear were swelling into them."

He studied hard and with advantage while in Germany; the time he passed there was always a pleasant recollec

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