PREFACE.

It is hoped that the following paper will be some contribution to an understanding of the relations between English and German literature, though its main purpose is to determine some features in the intellectual character of De Quincey.

I have not been able to trace all of De Quincey's references. He often fails to mention a book from which he quotes, and many times even the name of the author is not given. References marked (?) are doubtful. There are a few peculiarities in spelling in the quotations from De Quincey.

I wish to express my thanks for valuable suggestions to Professors Martin and Ziegler and Dr. Robertson of Strassburg, and to Herr Th. Knorr for assistance in identifying the quotations from Jean Paul.

To Professor Koeppel especially I owe much of the material presented, and for his never-failing encouragement and personal kindness I can not be too grateful.

Perhaps no period in De Quincey's life was so significant as the years between his escape from school and his entrance into Oxford. He has described it at length in the Confessions his wanderings in Wales, his lonely life in the London streets, the money-lender and the beggar-girl, the melancholy the melancholy history of Ann. From that time came his knowledge of the world, the full development of his human sympathies, and most of the experiences which in his later life lived again in dreams and visions. In those years his opinions and his character took form.

At this time, too, De Quincey made his first acquaintance with German literature. It was during his tramp about Wales in the summer of 1802, when he was seventeen years old. He had run away from school and was living a roaming life among the hills, sleeping in the fields, or, when the nights were cold, in peasants' houses or the cheaper inns. Among the tourists in the region he met a young German, named de Haren, who had held a commission in the British navy. From him De Quincey learned of Jean Paul, Hamann and Hippel; but as the two were together only a few weeks, De

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Quincey could not have gone far in his study of the language. Three years later in Oxford, he began it in earnest; he had apparently a tutor from Dresden;1 he devoted himself to a German, named Schwartzburg, 2 and in a short time was in the depths of Kant and other German writers. In his most characteristic style De Quincey describes his first impression:

"It was a banner broad unfurl'd,

The picture of that western world."

These, or words like these, in which Wordsworth conveys the sudden apocalypse, as by an apparition, to an ardent and sympathizing spirit, of the stupendous world of America, rising, at once, like an exhalation, with all its shadowy forests, its endless savannas, and its pomp. of solitary waters well and truly might I have applied to my first launching upon that vast billowy ocean of the German literature. A banner it was, indeed, to me of miraculous promise, and suddenly unfurled. It seemed, in those days, an El Dorado as true and undeceiving as it was evidently inexhaustible". 3

From that time until 1812 De Quincey was reading German philosophy, particularly the works of Kant. Fichte and Schelling; "My library", he writes, "was rich in the wickedest of German speculations". For some years. after his mind was under the influence of opium; but in 1816 he was again able to read Kant with enjoyment and to return to the German theology, which, he says in 1852, "I studied at my peril thirty or forty years

1 Works II, 84.

2 De Quincey and his Friends, 108.

3 Works II, 84 f.

4 ib. XI, 370.

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ago". Leigh Hunt found him later in his London lodgings "in the midst of a German Ocean of Literature”.2 His favorite authors were always Jean Paul, Schiller and Kant. But his mind ranged over the whole field of German intellectual activity, and he became more or less familiar not only with poetry, pure literature, and metaphysics, but with theological and Biblical criticism, with German contributions to classical scholarship and ancient history, and even with German claims in Medicine and Mathematics. 3

In 1821 De Quincey began his literary career with the celebrated Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in The London Magazine. Shortly afterwards appeared a series of translations from the German, and from that time for thirty years German literature was one of his favorite themes.

From De Quincey, as from Carlyle, it is easy to gain the impression that England had no interest in German literature. But that is far from the truth. To be sure, German

1 De Quincey and his Friends, 224.

2 Page's Life I, 232.

3 See Appendix II.

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4 cf. Perry; German Influence in English Literature Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 40, 129 (1877). A. Brandl; Die Aufnahme von Goethe's Jugendwerken in England. Goethe-Jahrbuch, III, 27 ff. A. Brandl; Lenore in England. In Erich Schmidt's Charakteristiken, Berlin 1886, 244 ff. R. G. Alford; Goethe's Earliest Critics in England. In Publications of the English Goethe-Society, London 1893. No. VII, 8 ff. - H. W. Singer; Einige englische Urtheile über die Dramen deutscher Klassiker. In Studien zur Litteraturgeschichte. Michael Bernays gewidmet von Schülern und Freunden. Hamburg und Leipzig 1893, 1 ff. Th. Süpfle; Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Litteratur in England im letzten Drittel des 18. Jahrhunderts. In Zeitschrift für vergleichende Litteraturgeschichte. Neue Folge, Bd. 6, 1893, 305 ff. W. Streuli; Thomas Carlyle als Vermittler deutscher Litteratur und deutschen Geistes. Zürich 1895, 6 ff.