Besides, he was now old and decaying. Nor at any time, nor in any accomplishment, could Klopstock have shone, unless in the respectable art of skating. _There_ he had a real advantage. The author of "The Messiah," I have authority for saying, skated with the ease and grace of a regular artist; whereas the poet of the "Excursion" sprawled upon the ice like a cow dancing a cotillon. Wordsworth did the very opposite of that with which he was taxed; for, happening to look down at Klopstock's swollen legs, and recollecting his age, he felt touched by a sort of filial pity for his helplessness. And he came to the conclusion that it would not seem becoming in a young and as yet obscure author to report too consciously the real superiority which he found it easy to maintain in such a colloquy. [60] He was absent on this tour in Germany from September 1798 to November 1799.--M. [61] Published in Richardson's Correspondence. But neither had Klopstock the pretensions as a poet which the Blackwood writer seems to take for granted. Germany, the truth is, wanted a great epic poet. Not having produced one in that early and plastic stage of her literary soil when such a growth is natural and spontaneous, the next thing was to bespeak a substitute. The force of Coleridge's well-known repartee, when, in reply to a foreigner asserting for Klopstock the rank of German Milton, he said, "True, sir; a very _German_ Milton," cannot be fully appreciated but by one who is familiar with the German poetry, and the small proportion in which it is a natural, racy, and domestic growth. It has been often noticed as the misfortune of the Roman literature that it grew up too much under the oppression of Grecian models, and of Grecian models depraved by Alexandrian art--a fact, so far as it _was_ a fact, which tended to cripple the _genial_ and characteristic spirit of the national mind. But this evil, after all, did not take effect except in a partial sense. Rome had cast much of her literature in her own moulds before these exotic models had begun to domineer. In fact, the reproach is in a very narrow sense true. Not so with Germany. Her literature, since its revival in the last century (and the revival upon the impulse of what cattle!--Bodmer on the one hand, and Gottsched, the never-enough-to-be-despised Gottsched, on the other!) has hardly moved a step in the freedom of natural grace. England for nineteen, and France for the twentieth, of all her capital works, has given the too servile law: and, with regard to Klopstock, if ever there was a good exemplification of the spurious and the counterfeit in literature, seek it in "The Messiah." He is verily and indeed the _Birmingham_ Milton. This Klopstockian dialogue, by the way, was first printed (hardly _published_) in the original, or Lake edition of "The Friend." In the recast of that work it was omitted; nor has it been printed anywhere else that I am aware of.