that year Coleridge left Yarmouth for Hamburg with Wordsworth and his
sister. [1] The purpose of his two companions' tour is not known to
have been other than the pleasure, or mixed pleasure and instruction,
usually derivable from foreign travel; that of Coleridge was strictly,
even sternly, educational. Immediately on his arrival in Germany he
parted from the Wordsworths, who went on to Gozlar, [2] and took up his
abode at the house of the pastor at Ratzeburg, with whom he spent five
months in assiduous study of the language. In January he removed to
Gottingen. Of his life here during the next few months we possess an
interesting record in the _Early Years and Late Reflections_ of
Dr. Carrlyon, a book published many years after the events which it
relates, but which is quite obviously a true reflection of impressions
yet fresh in the mind of its writer when its materials were first
collected. Its principal value, in fact, is that it gives us Coleridge
from the standpoint of the average young educated Englishman of the
day, sufficiently intelligent, indeed, to be sensible of his fellow-
student's transcendent abilities, but as little awed by them out of
youth's healthy irreverence of criticism as the ordinary English
undergraduate ever has been by the intellectual supremacy of any
"greatest man of his day" who might chance to have been his
contemporary at Oxford or Cambridge. In Dr. Carrlyon's reminiscences
and in the quoted letters of a certain young Parry, another of the
English student colony at Gottingen, we get a piquant picture of the
poet-philosopher of seven-and-twenty, with his yet buoyant belief in
his future, his still unquenched interest in the world of things, and
his never-to-be-quenched interest in the world of thought, his even
then inexhaustible flow of disquisition, his generous admiration for
the gifts of others, and his _naive_ complacency--including, it
would seem, a touch of the vanity of personal appearance--in his own.
"He frequently," writes Dr. Carrlyon, "recited his own poetry, and not