“Nor will I not thy holy guidance bless,
And hymn thee, Godwin! with an ardent lay;
For that thy voice, in Passion’s stormy day
When wild I roam’d the bleak Heath of Distress,
Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way—
And told me that her name was Happiness.”
Sorrows of Werter, a sentimental novel of Goethe’s, the work by which he was most generally known to English readers in Hazlitt’s day.
laugh’d with Rabelais. Cf. Pope’s “Dunciad,” I, 22: “Or laugh and shake in Rab’lais easy chair.”
spoke with rapture of Raphael. Coleridge had visited Italy in 1806 on his return from a stay in Malta, and had devoted his time there to a study of Italian art. See p. [298] n.
Giotto (d. 1337), Ghirlandaio, whose real name was Domenico Bigardi (1449-1494), and Massaccio (1402-1429) were early Florentine painters.
wandered into Germany. Coleridge’s visit to Germany and his introduction to the leading German philosophers dates back to 1798-99.
Kantean philosophy. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was the leader of modern philosophy. “The writings of the illustrious sage of Königsberg, the founder of the Critical Philosophy, more than any other work, at once invigorated and disciplined my understanding. The originality, the depth, and the compression of the thoughts; the novelty and subtlety, yet solidity and importance of the distinctions; the adamantine chain of the logic; and I will venture to add—(paradox as it will appear to those who have taken their notion of Immanuel Kant from Reviewers and Frenchmen)—the clearness and evidence, of the Critique of Pure Reason; and Critique of the Judgment; of the Metaphysical Elements of Natural Philosophy; and of his Religion within the bounds of Pure Reason, took possession of me as with a giant’s hand. After fifteen years’ familiarity with them, I still read these and all his other productions with undiminished delight and increasing admiration.” “Biographia Literaria,” chap. IX.
Fichte, J. Gottlieb (1762-1814). “Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, or Lore of Ultimate Science, was to add the key-stone of the arch” of Kant’s system. Ibid.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph (1775-1829). “In Schelling’s Natur-Philosophie, and the System des Transcendentalen Idealismus, I first found a genial coincidence with much that I had toiled out for myself, and a powerful assistance in what I had yet to do.... Many of the most striking resemblances, indeed all the main and fundamental ideas, were born and matured in my mind before I had ever seen a single page of the German Philosopher; and I might indeed affirm with truth, before the most important works of Schelling had been written, or at least made public. Nor is this coincidence at all to be wondered at. We had studied in the same school; been disciplined by the same preparatory philosophy, namely, the writings of Kant; we had both equal obligations to the polar logic and dynamic philosophy of Giordano Bruno; and Schelling has lately, and, as of recent acquisition, avowed that same affectionate reverence for the labors of Behmen, and other mystics, which I had formed at a much earlier period.” Ibid.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729-1781), German dramatist and critic.