The departure of the two poets for the Continent was delayed only till they had seen their joint volume through the press. The _Lyrical Ballads_ appeared in the autumn of 1798, and on 16th September of 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 Göttingen. 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 Göttingen, 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 _naïve_ 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 unfrequently led us further into the labyrinth of his metaphysical elucidations, either of particular passages or of the original conception of any of his productions, than we were able to follow him. At the conclusion, for instance, of the first stanza of _Christabel_, he would perhaps comment at full length upon such a line as 'Tu--whit!--Tu--whoo!' that we might not fall into the mistake of supposing originality to be its sole merit." The example is not very happily chosen, for Coleridge could hardly have claimed "originality" for an onomatopoeia which occurs in one of Shakspeare's best known lyrics; but it serves well enough to illustrate the fact that he "very seldom went right to the end of any piece of poetry; to pause and