Whether he owed his successful acquirement of the language to these plans adopted by him, or whether to his extraordinary powers of mind, it must be left to others to judge. To form any thing like an accurate opinion, it may be necessary to re-state, that during this fourteen months' residence, he acquired such a knowledge of the German, as enabled him to make that extraordinary translation of the Wallenstein, (which will be presently noticed), reading at the same time several German authors, and storing up for himself the means of becoming familiar with others, on subjects in which the English language was deficient. In addition to what in this short period he effected, I may say that some part of this time was employed in receiving many lessons from professor Tychsen, in the Gothic of Ulphilas, which, says he,
"sufficed to make me acquainted with its grammar, and the radical words of most frequent occurrence; and with the occasional assistance of the same philosophical linguist, I read through Ottfried's Metrical Paraphrase of the Gospel, and the most important remains of the Theotiscan."
Coleridge's
Biographia
contains the history and developement of his mind till 1816, when it was published; he called it his
Literary Life
, but of necessity it is intermixed with his biography, as he must have found it impossible to separate them. He had even half promised himself to write his own biography, but the want of success in his literary labours, and the state of his health, caused him to think seriously that his life was diminishing too fast, to permit him to finish those great works, of which he had long planned the execution. The conception of these works was on such a scale, that even his giant intellect, with his great and continuous powers of application, could not have executed them. But to continue. — On his return to London, his first literary occupation was the translation of the
Wallenstein
, which he effected in six weeks, in a lodging in Buckingham-street, in the Strand; it was printed and published in 1800.
The MS. was purchased by Longman's house under the condition that the English Version and Schiller's Play in German were to be published at the same time. The play, as is well known to all German readers, is in three parts; the first part, the Camp, being considered by Coleridge as not sufficiently interesting to the British public to translate, it was not attempted; the second part, the Piccolomini, was translated with the occasional addition of some lines, in order to make out the thought when it appeared to require it, particularly in the Horological scene of the Watch Tower. In the last part the Death of Wallenstein is equally free, but the liberties taken with this play are those of omission.