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. 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.