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.

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

[86] 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, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first
condition of such abandonment must be 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 of nature he can renounce. He
leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflect
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, 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.

Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of
mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a
little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary)
good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature
within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those
delicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art
allows. In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of
genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a
philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as
possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the
transcendental schools of Germany.

The period of Coleridge's residence at Nether Stowey, 1797-1798, was
for him the annus mirabilis. Nearly all the chief works by which his
poetic fame will live were then composed or planned. What shapes
itself