“And so his Daneship, in this extraordinary style, went on fishing for compliments, and asking whether he did not speak just like Plato, and Cato, and Socrates, till he lost all opinion of Coleridge on finding that he was a Christian. The discarded poet then wrapped himself in his great-coat, and looked at the water, covered with foam and stars of flame, while every now and then detachments of it ‘darted off from the vessel’s side, each with its own constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness.’ By and by he lay down, and ‘looking up at two or three stars, which oscillated with the motion of the sails, fell asleep.’ “They landed at Hamburg, on the Elbe Stairs, at the Boom-House. Wordsworth, with a French emigrant, whose acquaintance he had cultivated at sea, went in search of a hotel, and put up at ‘Die Wilde Man,’ while the other wild man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, strolled about, amusing himself with looking at the ‘Dutch women, with large umbrella hats shooting out half a yard before them, and a prodigal plumpness of petticoat behind,’ and many similar striking and unusual spectacles. “In Hamburg the pair were introduced to the brother of the poet Klopstock, and to Professor Ebeling, a lively and intelligent man, but so deaf that they had to ‘drop all their pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.’ At Mr. Klopstock’s they saw a bust of the poet, whom they afterwards visited. It had a solemn and heavy greatness in the countenance, which corresponded with the notions entertained by Coleridge of his style and genius, and which were afterwards discovered not to exist in the prototype himself. Coleridge, whose chief object in coming to Germany was to become acquainted with the German language and literature, left Wordsworth in Hamburg, and went to Ratzeburg, where he boarded in the pastor’s house. He returned, however, for a few days, to take final leave of his friend, and the two paid a visit to Klopstock together. His house was one of a row of what appeared small summer-houses, with four or five rows of young meagre elms in front, and beyond these a green, bounded by a dead flat. The bard’s physiognomy disappointed them as much as his domicile. Coleridge recognised in it no likeness to the bust, and no traces either of sublimity or enthusiasm. Klopstock could only speak French and German, and Coleridge only English and Latin, so that Wordsworth, who was accomplished in French, acted as interpreter. It may here be mentioned that this ignorance of Coleridge’s brought upon him a peculiar sort of civility at Ratzeburg. The _amtmann_ of that place, anxious to be civil, and totally unable to find any medium of communication, every day they met, as the only courtesy he had it in his power to offer, addressed to him the whole stock of English he possessed, which was to this effect:-- ‘----ddam your ploot unt eyes, my dearest Englander, vhee goes it?’ The conversation with Klopstock