“Answer.—You do me too much honour, sir.
“The Dane.—Oh me, if you should tink I is flattering you! I haf ten tousand a year—yes, ten tousand a year—yes, ten tousand pound a year! Vell, and vat is dhat? Vy, a mere trifle! I ’ould’nt gif my sincere heart for ten times dhe money! Yes, you’re a got! I a mere man! But, my dear friend, dhink of me as a man! Is—is—I mean to ask you now, my dear friend—is I not very eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?
“And so his Daneship, in this extraordinary style, went on fishing for compliments, and asking whether he did not speak just like Plato, and Cato, and Socrates, till he lost all opinion of Coleridge on finding that he was a Christian. The discarded poet then wrapped himself in his great-coat, and looked at the water, covered with foam and stars of flame, while every now and then detachments of it ‘darted off from the vessel’s side, each with its own constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness.’ By and by he lay down, and ‘looking up at two or three stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, fell asleep.’
“They landed at Hamburg, on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom-House. Wordsworth, with a French emigrant, whose acquaintance he had cultivated at sea, went in search of a hotel, and put up at ‘Die Wilde Man,’ while the other wild man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolled about, amusing himself with looking at the ‘Dutch women, with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, and a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind,’ and many similar striking and unusual spectacles.
“In Hamburg the pair were introduced to the brother of the poet Klopstock, and to Professor Ebeling, a lively and intelligent man, but so deaf that they had to ‘drop all their pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.’ At Mr. Klopstock’s they saw a bust of the poet, whom they afterwards visited. It had a solemn and heavy greatness in the countenance, which corresponded with the notions entertained by Coleridge of his style and genius, and which were afterwards discovered not to exist in the prototype himself. Coleridge, whose chief object in coming to Germany was to become acquainted with the German language and literature, left Wordsworth in Hamburg, and went to Ratzeburg, where he boarded in the pastor’s house. He returned, however, for a few days, to take final leave of his friend, and the two paid a visit to Klopstock together. His house was one of a row of what appeared small summer-houses, with four or five rows of young meagre elms in front, and beyond these a green, bounded by a dead flat. The bard’s physiognomy disappointed them as much as his domicile. Coleridge recognised in it no likeness to the bust, and no traces either of sublimity or enthusiasm. Klopstock could only speak French and German, and Coleridge only English and Latin, so that Wordsworth, who was accomplished in French, acted as interpreter. It may here be mentioned that this ignorance of Coleridge’s brought upon him a peculiar sort of civility at Ratzeburg. The amtmann of that place, anxious to be civil, and totally unable to find any medium of communication, every day they met, as the only courtesy he had it in his power to offer, addressed to him the whole stock of English he possessed, which was to this effect:— ‘——ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest Englander, vhee goes it?’ The conversation with Klopstock turned entirely upon English and German literature, and in the course of it Wordsworth gave ample proofs of his great taste, industry, and information, and even showed that he was better acquainted with the highest German writers than the author of the ‘Messiah’ himself. On his informing the latter that Coleridge intended to translate some of his odes, the old man said to Coleridge—‘I wish you would render into English some select passages of the “Messiah,” and revenge me of your countrymen.’ ‘This,’ says Coleridge, ‘was the liveliest thing he produced in the whole conversation.’ That genius was, however, deeply moved, but could not help being disgusted with the venerable bard’s snow-white periwig, which felt to his eye what Mr. Virgil would have been to his ear. After this, Coleridge left Hamburg, and resided four months in Ratzeburg, and five in Gottingen. Wordsworth had two subsequent interviews with Klopstock, and dined with him. He kept notes of these conversations, some of which are given in ‘Satyrane’s Letters,’ in the second volume of the ‘Biographia Literaria.’ One or two incidents strongly illustrate Wordsworth’s peculiar character and poetical taste. He complained, for example, of Lessing making the interest of the ‘Oberon’ turn upon mere appetite. ‘Well, but,’ said Klopstock, ‘you see that such poems please everybody.’ He immediately replied, that ‘it was the province of a great poet to raise a people up to his own level—not to descend to theirs.’ Klopstock afterwards found fault with the Fool in ‘Lear,’ when Wordsworth observed that ‘he gave a terrible wildness to the distress’—a remark which evinced a deep appreciation of that awful drama. Wordsworth subsequently made a short tour, and visited Coleridge at Gottingen on his return.’
Wordsworth, during the greater part of his time in Germany lived at Goslar, and he found the people neither very friendly nor hospitable. Goslar is situate at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, which are covered with fine oaks and beech, and the poet and his sister, to make up for the loss of society in the town, sought solitude amongst these magnificent woods. Among the poems written at this time were, “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “Three years she grew in sun and shower,” “Lines to a Sexton,” “The Danish Boy,” intended as a prelude to a ballad never written; “A Poet’s Epitaph,” “Art thou a Statist?” “Lucy Gray.” All these poems and many more were written in 1799; and the latter is founded on a circumstance related by the poet’s sister “of a little girl, who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow-storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other footsteps of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences, which I have endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe’s matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement,—far from it; but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may enlarge the circle of their sympathies, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment.” “Lines written in Germany, ’98-9” have the following note attached to them in the “Memoirs,” with which I will conclude these extracts.
“A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed, by the side of my sister, in our lodgings at a draper’s house, in the romantic imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz Forest. In this town the German emperors of the Franconian line were accustomed to keep their court, and it retains vestiges of ancient splendour. So severe was the cold of this winter that when we passed out of the parlour warmed by the stove, our cheeks were struck by the air as if by cold iron. I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a pelisse lined with fur, and a dog-skin bonnet, such as was worn by the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts, in a sort of public ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had no companion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by me. I consequently became much attached to it.” During these walks he composed the ‘Poet’s Epitaph.’ His ‘Poem of Ruth,’ ‘The Address to the Scholars of a Village School,’ ‘The two April Mornings,’ ‘The Fountain,’ ‘A Conversation,’ ‘Matthew,’ and a variety of others were likewise written about this time. In his correspondence with Coleridge at this time, the latter speaks in terms of the highest affection for him. ‘I am sure I need but say,’ he writes, ‘how you are incorporated with the better part of my being; how whenever I spring forward into the future with noble affections, I always alight by your side.’”
On the 10th of February, 1799, Wordsworth and his sister left Goslar, and returned towards England. The poet was now nearly thirty years of age; and as the gates of the Imperial City closed behind him, he felt like a bird suddenly released from captivity, and resolved to build up some stately architecture of verse, which men would not willingly let die. Accordingly he commenced the “Prelude,” within the very hum of the city. Six out of the fourteen books which compose it, were written before 1805.
In the spring of 1799 the poet and his sister returned to England; and in a letter to Cottle, written immediately after their arrival, we find them in “the county of Durham, just on the borders of Yorkshire,” thankful, after sufficient experience of Germany, for the dear face of old England once more.