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 bookworm and a day-dreamer.  He remained through life an omnivorous, though unsystematic, reader.  He was helpless in practical affairs, and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in the opium habit.  On his return to England, in 1800, he went to reside at Keswick, in the Lake Country, with his brother-in-law, Southey, whose industry supported both families.  During his last nineteen years Coleridge found an asylum under the roof of Mr. James Gilman, of Highgate, near London, whither many of the best young men in England were accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge’s wonderful talk.  Talk, indeed, was the medium through which he mainly influenced his generation.  It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on paper.  His Table Talk—­crowded with pregnant paragraphs—­was taken down from his lips by his nephew, Henry Coleridge.  His criticisms of Shakspere are nothing but notes, made here and there, from a course of lectures delivered before the Royal Institute, and never fully written out.  Though only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the most penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticisms in English.  He was always forming projects and abandoning them.  He projected a great work on Christian philosophy, which was to have been his magnum opus, but he never wrote it.  He projected an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem.  “I schemed it at twenty-five,” he said, “but, alas! venturum expectat.”  What bade fair to be his best poem, Christabel, is a fragment.  Another strangely beautiful poem, Kubla Khan—­which came to him, he said, in sleep—­is even more fragmentary.  And the most important of his prose remains, his Biographia Literaria, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off abruptly.

It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge’s great service to posterity resided.  He was what J.S.  Mill called a “seminal mind,” and his thought had that power of stimulating thought in others which is the mark and the privilege of original genius.  Many a man has owed to some sentence of Coleridge’s, if not the awakening in himself of a new intellectual life, at least the starting