To shift the site of Coleridge's nationalist activity from England to Germany seems to render the obscure perverse. Standard conceptions of Germany in the life of Coleridge undermine claims for his nationalism and activity through quips like Crabb Robinson's – “Coleridge's mind is more German than English” – and through Germany's alleged responsibility for his withdrawal from the “real world,” his shift from poetry to metaphysics, and his penchant for copying rather than imitating. Carlyle sets this image in place through his memorialization of Coleridge “looking down on London and its smoke tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life's battle.” He ascribes Coleridge's withdrawal to residence in a “Kantean haze world” complete with “vacant air castles and dimmelting ghosts and shadows.” Subsequent critics have perpetuated this view, drawing support from Coleridge's own paeans to German philosophy in Biographia Literaria and his praise for the Germans as a speculative people with whom “to do” is “impossible.” Yet part of the nationalism and activity that underlies Coleridge's allegiance to Germany should already be surmisable from the foregoing discussion. As his version of the growth of a poet-philosopher's mind has it, “Germany” makes passive minds active. To Kant and Schelling Coleridge owes his liberation from the constraints of necessitarianism and empiricism, a shift of mind which he seeks to model for his compatriots. Contingencies of mind and history make contemporary Germany the only way back to “spiritual platonic old England” (CN 2: 3121).