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to complete his education by foreign travel, and by means of the pension 

 they offered him, be enabled to restrict himself to literary work. Cole- 

 ridge therefore started for Germany, in company with his friend 

 ■\Vordsworth, in the autumn; and I must recommend you to read at the 

 end of his Biographia Literaria, the letters in which he describes so 

 inimitably the incidents of the voyage to Hamburg, and the subsequent 

 tour. They had letters of introduction to Klopstock, and many talks 

 with him about poetry. They attended Blumenbach's lectures on natural 

 history, and Eichhorn's on the New Testament. Coleridge learnt Gothic 

 and German, and made his first acquaintance with German philosophy. 

 Late in 1799 he returned to England, and in July, 1800, he came with his 

 family to Greta Hall, where he lived for nearly the next four years. 

 There is a letter dated April in the following year, in which he describes 

 Greta Hall to Southey, and urges him to join them. This was done, 

 and for a time the two families resided together in that house, so familiar 

 to us all here. Coleridge had married, as you know, some years before 

 this. Miss Sarah Fricker, a sister of Mrs. Southey's, — he had when he 

 came with her to Greta Hall, two living children. Hartley, the eldest, 

 was born at Bristol, and was now four years old. Derwent was born in 

 1800. A second child, Berkeley, had been born at Nether Stowey, but 

 only lived a year. Sara was born at Greta Hall in 1802. The reminis- 

 cences of his gifted daughter Sara, as to her early home, are very 

 interesting — for she continued to live on here with the Southeys and her 

 mother, till her marriage in 1829. 



"Two houses inter-connected under one roof," she describes Greta 

 Hall. " The larger part of which my parents and my uncle and aunt 

 Southey occupied, while the smaller was the abode of Mr. Jackson, the 

 landlord. It was built on a hill, on one side of the town of Keswick, 

 having a large nursery garden in front. The gate at the end of this 

 garden opened upon the end of the town. A few steps further was the 

 bridge over the Greta. At the back of the Hall was an orchard of not 

 very productive apple-trees and plum-trees. Below this a wood stretched 

 down to the river side. A rough path ran along the bottom of the wood, 

 and led on the one hand to the carding-mill field, which tlie river near by 



