Samuel Taylor Coleridge [II] [October 1834]

About the latter end of the century, Coleridge visited North Germany again, in company with Mr. and Miss Wordsworth. Their tour was chiefly confined to the Hartz Forest and its neighbourhood. An anonymous writer, who attacked Coleridge most truculently in an early number of Blackwood, and with an acharnement that must astonish those who knew its object, has made the mistake of supposing Coleridge to have been the chief speaker, who did not speak at all. The force of Coleridge’s well-known repartee—when, in reply to a foreigner asserting that Klopstock was the German Milton, he said, ‘True, sir; a very German Milton,’—cannot be fully appreciated but by one who is familiar with the German poetry, and the small proportion in which it is a natural and spontaneous product. About the close of the first revolutionary war it must have been, or in the brief interval of peace, that Coleridge resorted to the English Lakes as a place of residence.