on of man to his place in nature, his
prospects in relation to it--that it ever tends to become theory
through their contagion. Even in Goethe, who has brilliantly handled
the subject in his lyrics entitled _Gott und Welt_, it becomes
something stiffer than poetry; it is tempered by the 'pale cast' of
his technical knowledge of the nature of colours, of anatomy, of the
metamorphosis of plants.

That, however, which had only a limited power over Coleridge as
sentiment, entirely possessed him as a philosophical idea. We shall
see in what follows how deep its power was, how it pursued him
everywhere, and seemed to him to interpret every question.
Wordsworth's poetry is an optimism; it says man's relation to the
world is, and may be seen by man to be, a perfect relation; but it is
an optimism that begins and ends in an abiding instinct. Coleridge
accepts the same optimism as a philosophical idea, but an idea is
relative to an intellectual assent; sometimes it seems a better
expression of facts, sometimes a worse, as the understanding weighs it
in the logical balances. And so it is not a permanent consolation. It
is only in the rarer moments of intellectual warmth and sunlight that
it is entirely credible. In less exhilarating moments that perfect
relation of man and nature seems to shift and fail; that is, the
philosophical idea ceases to be realizable; and with Coleridge its
place is not supplied, as with Wordsworth, by the corresponding
sentiment or instinct.

What in Wordsworth is a sentiment or instinct, is in Coleridge a
philosophical idea. In other words, Coleridge's talent is a more
intellectual one than Wordsworth's, more dramatic, more
self-conscious. Wordsworth's talent, deeply reflective as it is,
because its base is an instinct, is deficient in self-knowledge.
Possessed by the rumours and voices of the haunted country, the
borders of which he has passed alone, he never thinks of withdrawing
from it to look down upon it from one of the central heights of human
life. His power absorbs him, not he it; he cannot turn it round or get
without it; he does not estimate its general relation to life. But
Coleridge, just because the essence of his talent is the intuition of
an idea, commands his talent. He not only feels with Wordsworth the
expression of mind in nature, but he can project that feeling outside
him, reduce it to a psychological law, define its relation to other
elements of culture, place it in a complete