eciprocally gild the mind
and nature with a kind of 'heavenly alchemy':

... My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,
The external world is fitted to the mind:
And the creation, by no lower name
Can it be called, which they with blended might
Accomplish.[37]

[37] Preface to the _Excursion_.

In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the
aspects and transitions of nature, a reflective, but altogether
unformulated, analysis of them.

There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep
as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to
the dream as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such
abandonment is an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the
_Lines composed above Tintern_ without feeling how potent the physical
element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius:--'felt in the
blood and felt along the heart,'--'My whole life I have lived in
quiet thought.' The stimulus which most artists require from nature he
can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains to
reflect a glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the
floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the
air. Coleridge's temperament, [Greek: aei en sphodra orexei], with its
faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that.

My genial spirits fail
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within.

It is that flawless temperament in Wordsworth which keeps his
conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of
sentiment or instinct, and confines it, to those delicate and subdued
shades of expression which perfect art allows. In sadder dispositions,
that is in the majority of cases, where such a conviction has existed,
it has stiffened into a formula, it has frozen into a scientific or
pseudo-scientific theory. For the perception of those affinities
brings one so near the absorbing speculative problems of
life--optimism, the proporti