ety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by
the poets of any age or country, and I made a resolution to supply, in
some degree, the deficiency." In later life he is said to have been
impatient of any thing spoken or written by another about mountains,
conceiving himself to have a monopoly of "the power of hills." But
Wordsworth did not stop with natural description. Matthew Arnold has
said that the office of modern poetry is the "moral interpretation of
Nature." Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To him Nature was
alive and divine. He felt, under the veil of phenomena,

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused."

He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of Pantheism, which
identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who
identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in
Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his
rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were
young, they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798,
after the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went
together to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the
literature {234} and philosophy of Germany made little direct impression
upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the
saying of the poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the
romanticist Burger above both Goethe and Schiller.

It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), who was pre-eminently
the _thinker_ among the literary men of his generation, that the new
German thought found its way into England. During the fourteen months
which he spent in Germany--chiefly at Ratzburg and Goettingen--he had
familiarized himself with the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant
and of his continuators, Fichte and Schelling, as well as with the
general literature of Germany. On his return to England, he published,
in 1800, a free translation of Schiller's _Wallenstein_, and through his
writings, and more especially through his conversations, he became the
conductor by which German philosophic ideas reached the English literary
class.

Coleridge described himself as being from boyhood a book-worm and a
day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though
unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practic