effort for Elbingerode, yet the following lines, inscribed in the Brocken-stammbuch by

dictated by him:

""Tis sweet to him who all the week

Through city crowds must push his way,
To stroll alone through woods and fields,
And hallow thus the Sabbath day.

"But what is all to his delight,

Who, having long been doomed to roam,
Throws off the bundle from his back
Before the door of his own home.

"Home sickness is no baby-pang

That feel I hourly more and more;
There's healing only in thy wings,

Thou breeze that play'st on Albion's shore."

wrote the following, from Milton :—

"About me round I saw,

Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains,
And liquid lapse of murmuring streams, by these
Creatures that lived and moved and walked or flew;
Birds on the branches warbling; all things smiled
With fragrance, and with joy my heart o'erflowed.”

were

And as Coleridge had alluded to Albion's shore, our young friend Frederick Parry must needs say something too of old England, but not being equally inspired by the muses, he wrote down in plain English, that " as the Brocken majestically towers over the surrounding hills, so does England, the queen of isles, soar above the other nations of the earth."

We much admired his modesty, and took the opportunity of commenting upon the well-known propensity of English travellers to carry the said feeling of superiority somewhat too far. But Frederick was young, and what his heart felt his pen expressed.

Almost every where on the Continent, these albums (Germanicè stammbuchs) claim the traveller's attention, and constitute no bad criterion of the intercourse of any particular place with the rest of the world. During the long war of the Revolution, they presented comparatively few notices of English travellers, to whom the south of Europe in particular was for many years closed; insomuch, that at the inn in the Valley of Chamouni, so frequented by our countrymen in peaceful times, it was difficult to catch the name of an Englishman on the pages of its album, when I looked them over, in the summer of 1802, during the opportunity afforded by the short peace of Amiens.

The Germans, of all mortals the most imaginative, take extraordinary delight in their albums ; and Coleridge being a NOTICEABLE ENGLANDER, and a poet withal, was not unfrequently requested to favour with a scrap of verse persons who had no very particular claims upon his muse. As a specimen of the playful scintillations of this gifted man upon such occasions, I subjoin the following quatrain, which he wrote when about to leave the

university, in the stammbuch of a Göttingen student, who had attended the same course of lectures (Collegium) with him :

"We both attended the same college,

Where sheets of paper we did blur many,
And now we're going to sport our knowledge,
In England I, and you in Germany."

Thus seizing the only circumstance which there probably was in common between his German friend and himself, and enshrining a thought which would be likely to lose nothing by a free transfusion into his friend's German, with good measure of note and comment illustrative of his fellow collegian.

Of the many topics of conversation which occupied us during this eight days' tour, the celebrated Sir J. Mackintosh formed one. I have been informed that Coleridge first became acquainted with him at the house of his friend Mr. Wedgewood, where subjects drawn from the inmost recesses of the mind, and, happily perhaps, beyond the reach of ordinary capacities, were freely discussed; and, as it must have been a complete war of Greeks, the tug, no doubt, was at times terrible. Coleridge, however honourable the testimony he has elsewhere borne of him, spoke to us of Mackintosh as of a man who was disposed to hold every one cheap whose talents were not, in his opinion, of a superior order; and, at the same time, he told us, without mincing the matter, that

he thought very highly of himself, i. e. Coleridge himself.

Tom Poole,* he said, would have been the best match for him; for if Mackintosh had stopped him in his argument, as an unsound logician, telling him that his major was bad, his minor defective, &c., Poole would have replied," My ideas are too important to require or even to admit, of such dress. Your logical deductions and scholastic reasoning are mere trash. Take but half the pains to understand me, that you take to refute me, by entangling me in your logical network, and you may chance to acquire knowledge worth possessing." In short, it was evident that Coleridge, at the period of our tour, had no great liking for Mackintosh, whatever may have been the cause; and this, notwithstanding Mackintosh carried the high opinion he entertained of him to the length of afterwards inviting him to accompany him as a "talking companion" to India, in which capacity he would certainly have been no small acquisition.

Coleridge must have been in a capricious mood, and under the influence of no small chagrin, when he wrote that eccentric and bitter lampoon, "The Two Round Spaces on the Tombstone," of which I have preserved a copy; but I never expected nor wished to have seen it in print; neither can the

* Mr. Poole, of Stowey, so many of whose interesting letters adorn Dr. Paris's Life of Sir H. Davy.

special pleading with which it was not long since introduced into a celebrated magazine, change the character of the vindictive spirit in which it appears to have been conceived and written*; any more than the specious psychological vindication which Coleridge has himself prefixed to the republication of

"Fire-Famine-and Slaughter,"

among his "Sibylline Leaves," can make any earthly being, of common sense, a convert to his wire-drawn argumentation and unphilosophical sentimentality. The world, in general, will judge of things as it finds them; and, if evil be on the face of the production, it will be to little purpose to say that it is mere froth from the milk of human kindness, as Coleridge would have his readers suppose with respect to this metrical and truly Satanic composition, yclept a "War Eclogue."+

* This very Epitaph has likewise, I am sorry to say, been since published, by Coleridge himself, in the last edition of his poetical works, and under shelter too of the same lame apology as that prefixed to his "Fire-Famine --and Slaughter."

It is true that Coleridge has prefixed to his "Apologetic Preface" the following quotations:

"Me dolor incautum, me lubrica duxerit ætas,
Me tumor impulerit, me devius egerit ardor;
Te tamen haud decuit paribus concurrere telis,
En adsum: veniam, confessus crimina, posco."

Claud. Epist. ad Had.

"There is one that slippeth in his speech, but not from his heart; and who is he that hath not offended with his tongue?"-Ecclesiasticus, xix. i6.

But the " Apology" is throughout defensive, and his "Veniam, confessus crimina, posco," noways applicable to it.