more there is no question of language. Coleridge
takes the issue on to the highest and most secure ground. Wordsworth's
obsession with realistic detail is a contravention of the essential
catholicity of poetry; and this accidentality is manifested in
laboriously exact description both of places and persons. The poet
sterilises the creative activity of poetry, in the first case, for no
reason at all, and in the second, because he proposes as his immediate
object a moral end instead of the giving of aesthetic pleasure. His
prophets and wise men are pedlars and tramps not because it is probable
that they should be of this condition--it is on the contrary highly
improbable--but because we are thus to be taught a salutary moral
lesson. The question of language in itself, if it enters at all here,
enters only as the indifferent means by which a non-poetic end is
sought. The accidentality lies not in the words, but in the poet's
intention.

Coleridge's third and fourth points, 'an undue predilection for the
dramatic form,' and 'an eddying instead of a progression of thought,'
may be passed as quickly as he passes them himself, for in any case they
could only be the cause of a jejuneness of language. The fifth, more
interesting, is the appearance of 'thoughts and images too great for the
subject ... an approximation to what might be called _mental_ bombast.'
Coleridge brings forward as his first instance of this four lines which
have taken a deep hold on the affections of later generations:--

'They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude!
And then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.'

Coleridge found an almost burlesque bathos in the second couplet after
the first. It would be difficult for a modern critic to accept that
verdict altogether; nevertheless his objection to the first couplet as a
description of physical vision is surely sound. And it is interesting to
note that the objection has been evaded by posterity in a manner which
confirms Coleridge's criticism. The 'inward eye' is almost universally
remembered apart from its context, and interpreted as a description of
the purely spiritual process to which alone, in Coleridge's opinion, it
was truly apt.

The enumeration of Wordsworth's excellences which follows is masterly;
and the exhilaration with which one rises through the crescendo to the
famous: 'Last and pre-eminently, I challenge for this poet the gift of
_Im