of Nature or the work of man, was neat and artificial.  It pleased me far better, than if the houses and gardens, and pleasure fields, had been in a nobler taste:  for this nobler taste would have been mere apery.  The busy, anxious, money-loving merchant of Hamburg could only have adopted, he could not have enjoyed the simplicity of Nature.  The mind begins to love Nature by imitating human conveniences in Nature; but this is a step in intellect, though a low one—­and were it not so, yet all around me spoke of innocent enjoyment and sensitive comforts, and I entered with unscrupulous sympathy into the enjoyments and comforts even of the busy, anxious, money-loving merchants of Hamburg.  In this charitable and catholic mood I reached the vast ramparts of the city.  These are huge green cushions, one rising above the other, with trees growing in the interspaces, pledges and symbols of a long peace.  Of my return I have nothing worth communicating, except that I took extra post, which answers to posting in England.  These north German post chaises are uncovered wicker carts.  An English dust-cart is a piece of finery, a chef d’oeuvre of mechanism, compared with them:  and the horses!—­a savage might use their ribs instead of his fingers for a numeration table.  Wherever we stopped, the postilion fed his cattle with the brown rye bread of which he eat himself, all breakfasting together; only the horses had no gin to their water, and the postilion no water to his gin.  Now and henceforward for subjects of more interest to you, and to the objects in search of which I loft you:  namely, the literati and literature of Germany.

Believe me, I walked with an impression of awe on my spirits, as W——­ and myself accompanied Mr. Klopstock to the house of his brother, the poet, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the city gate.  It is one of a row of little common-place summer-houses, (for so they looked,) with four or five rows of young meagre elm trees before the windows, beyond which is a green, and then a dead flat intersected with several roads.  Whatever beauty, (thought I,) may be before the poet’s eyes at present, it must certainly be purely of his own creation.  We waited a few minutes in a neat little parlour, ornamented with the figures of two of the Muses and with prints, the subjects of which were from Klopstock’s odes.[225]

[225] ‘There is a rhetorical amplitude and brilliancy in the Messias,’ says Mr. Carlyle, ’which elicits in our critic (Mr. Taylor) an instinct truer than his philosophy is.  Neither has the still purer spirit of Klopstock’s odes escaped him.  Perhaps there is no writing in our language that offers so correct an emblem of him as this analysis.’  I remember thinking Taylor’s ‘clear outline’ of the Messias the most satisfying account of a poem I ever read:  it fills the mind with a vision of pomp and magnificence, which it is pleasanter to contemplate, as it were, from afar, massed together