enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he
says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his
principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style
which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;
_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral
or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge
gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair,
and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He
gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland
Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting,
had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of
probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--

'And one, the rarest, was a shell
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.

'Our Highland Boy oft visited
The house which held this prize; and led
By choice or chance, did thither come
One day, when no one was at home,
And found the door unbarred.'

The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it
does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth
has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus
of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the
detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of
the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however,
indubitable:--

'Thou hast a nest, for thy love and thy rest.
And though little troubled with sloth,
Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth
To be such a traveller as I.
Happy, happy liver!
_With a soul as strong as a mountain River
Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver_,
Joy and jollity be with us both,
Hearing thee or else some other
As merry as a Brother
I on the earth will go plodding on,
By myself, cheerfully, till the day is done.'

The two lines in italics are discordant. But again it is no question of
language in itself; it is an internal discrepancy between the parts of a
whole already debilitated by metrical insecurity.

Coleridge's second point against Wordsworth is 'a _matter-of-factness_
in certain poems.' Once