He felt, under the veil of phenomena,
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thought: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
He approached, if he did not actually reach, the view of pantheism which
identifies God with Nature; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who
identify Nature with the soul of man. This tendency was not inspired in
Wordsworth by German philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his rambles
with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, when both were young,
they had, indeed, discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, after
the publication of the _Lyrical Ballads_, the two friends went together
to Germany, where Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literature and
philosophy of Germany made little direct impression upon Wordsworth. He
disliked Goethe, and he quoted with approval the saying of the poet
Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that he placed the romanticist Buerger
above both Goethe and Schiller.
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.
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