In his ‘Table Talk’ (London, 1835, vol. ii. p. 70), Coleridge’s opinion is recorded thus: 

“I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen (fourteen) books on the growth of an individual mind—­superior, as I used to think, upon the whole to ‘The Excursion’.  You may judge how I felt about them by my own Poem upon the occasion.  Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy.  He was to treat man as man,—­a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilisation of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration.  Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on.  It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.

“I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great Philosopher than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position which is peculiarly—­perhaps, I might say exclusively—­fitted for him.  His proper title is ’Spectator ab extra’.”

The following are Coleridge’s Lines addressed to Wordsworth: 

  TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  COMPOSED ON THE NIGHT AFTER HIS RECITATION OF A POEM ON THE GROWTH OF
  AN INDIVIDUAL MIND

  Friend of the wise! and teacher of the good! 
  Into my heart have I received that lay
  More than historic, that prophetic lay
  Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)
  Of the foundations and the building up
  Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell
  What may be told, to the understanding mind
  Revealable; and what within the mind
  By vital breathings secret as the soul
  Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart
  Thoughts all too deep for words!—­
             Theme hard as high,
  Of smiles spontaneous, and mysterious fears
  (The first-born they of Reason and twin-birth),
  Of tides obedient to external force,
  And currents self-determined, as might seem,
  Or by some inner power; of moments awful,
  Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
  When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
  The Light reflected, as a light bestowed—­