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fruit; but more lasting and extended over a broader surface was the effect our country produced on our neighbours in mental life in general and particularly on their poetry during the last forty years.

It is true that we do not meet now with any gigantic cosmopolitan minds, but instead of them a great number of serious, contemplative students and quiet observers. Serious study and trans- lation gradually become more fashionable, German philology, classical and modern, makes its entrance in the English and chiefly Scotch universities and, in its train, poetical criticism, and, although scantily enough, our great philosophers find an occasional interpreter, contributing thereby a little in doing away with many a mediaeval fetter which held in bondage the studies of abstract speculation. No intelligent and well instructed Englisnman would now deny that nearly all the branches of the Poetry of the day have been lastingly and beneficially affected by this element.

Among those who have been active up to our own days and taken no small share in this work from the very beginning of their literary career, we mention Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Lakist. He is no doubt the most original among the poets of that sect; his lyrical dreams, his purely beautiful and deeply meditative, dramatical and narrative poems are now spread throughout the world and bear marked traces of his predilection for German poetry and philosophy. After having first been an ardent admirer of the French revolution*) and having led an unsteady, troublesome life and even cherished, for some time, the romantie scheme of regenerating the human race in his transatlantic„Pantisocracy“ (an idea borrowed perhaps from Plotin's Platonopolis) our poet becomes all at once a quiet settler and husband; and then sets out with his friend Wordsworth on his visit to Germany, which exercis ed so stirring an influcnce on his mind and gave a new Direction to his literary career. At Ratzeburg and Göttingen he devotes himself to German literature, studies the Gothic of Ulphilas, Otfried, the Minne- singers and Mastersingers, particularly Hans Sachs, becomes acquainted with the works of the leaders of the period of revival in the 18. Century and approaches Schiller and Kant. With an impression of awe and humility he enters the residence of Klopstock, the German Milton, and then returns to England with an immense stock of new knowledge and deeply impressed by the philosophy and poetry of our nation. He did not fail soon to make practical use of these new acquisitions. There are, in fact, only a few of his productions published after this visit to Germany that are not, in some de- gree, tinctured with this new spirit. He began with metrical translations from the German. 0f these his„Piccolomini“ and„Wallenstein“ although somewhat mutilated are the most remarkable.

More powerfully, however, than by Schiller and his compeers, Coleridge, in aeccordance with his predilection for the mystical, the supernatural and symbolical, felt attracted by our Romantic school. In many of his ballads and odes and especially in the two wonderful poems„Christabel“

*) Cf. his„France, An Ode“ and the lines:

When slumbering Freedem roused by high Disdain With giant fury bursts her triple chain!

Fierce on her front the blasting Dog-star glowed; Her banners, like a midnight-meteor, flowed; Amid the yelling of the storm-rent skies

She came, and scattered battles from her eyes! Then Exultation waked the patriot fire

And swept with wild hand the Tyrtean lyre:

Red from then Tyrant's wound I took the lance, And strode in joy the reeking plains of France.