Hazlitt, not yet soured and savage, heard Coleridge preach in 1798; and tells us in true Hazlittian style how his voice rose like a storm of rich distilled perfumes; how he launched into his subject like an eagle dallying with the wind; how, in brief, poetry and philosophy had met together, truth and genius had embraced under the eye and with the sanction of reason. The Unitarian firmament was too cramped for this brilliant meteor; the philosophy expounded from the pulpits seemed to him meagre and rigid; and, while hesitating, he received an offer from the generous Wedgwoods, anxious to spend some part of their wealth in the patronage of genius. Rumours had reached England by this time that a great intellectual light had arisen in Germany. The Wedgwoods gave Coleridge a modest annuity, unfettered (as I can now say) by any condition whatever, a fact which makes the subsequent withdrawal a harsher measure than has been supposed. Coleridge resolved to go to Germany, catch the sacred fire of the Kantian philosophy, and return to England to regenerate the mind of his countrymen. He started in September 1798, when he was just twenty-six, in company with the friend who alone could be compared to him in intellectual power. Wordsworth had been attracted, as Lamb and Southey had been attracted before him. Coleridge and Wordsworth had discussed the principles of their common art; and Coleridge had applied them in those wonderful poems, the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel' (the first part), which were to be but the prologue to a fuller utterance; a wonderful prologue, for, though followed by nothing, it remained unique and inimitable. Coleridge was not yet _déterré_, as Pope said of Johnson; the ordinary critics had only a passing smile or sneer for the little clique which published its obscure utterances in a provincial town. Monthly and critical reviewers—the arbiters of taste—would have been astonished to hear that Coleridge and Wordsworth and Lamb and Southey would soon stand in the very front ranks of English literature; and he must have a clearer conscience than I who would cast a stone at critics for not at once detecting the first germs of rising genius. But, as _ex post facto_ prophets, we are able to see that Coleridge already had not only given proofs of astonishing power, but had won what was even more valuable, the true sympathy and cordial affection of young men who were the distinct leaders of the next generation. Even material support was not wanting from such men as Poole and Wedgwood, sufficient to ensure a fair start for the little band of prophets. We should have been justified in foretelling, with unusual confidence, a career of surpassing brilliancy for the youth, of whom it seemed only questionable whether he would choose to be a second Bacon or a second Milton.