Unfortunately, the elaborate exposition of the first three arguments is not only unnecessary but confusing, for Coleridge goes on to distinguish, interestingly enough, between a language proper to poetry, a language proper to prose, and a neutral language which may be used indifferently in prose and poetry, and later still he quotes a beautiful passage from Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida as an example of this neutral language, forgetting that, if his principles are correct, Chaucer was guilty of a sin against art in writing Troilus and Cressida in metre.  The truth, of course, is that the paraphernalia of principles goes by the board.  In order to refute the Wordsworthian theory of a language of real life supremely fitted for poetry you have only to point to the great poets, and to judge the fitness of the language of poetry you can only examine the particular poem.  Wordsworth was wrong and self-contradictory without doubt; but Coleridge was equally wrong and self-contradictory in arguing that metre necessitated a language essentially different from that of prose.

So it is that the philosophic part of the specifically literary criticism of the Biographia takes us nowhere in particular.  The valuable part is contained in his critical appreciation of Wordsworth’s poetry and that amazing chapter—­a little forlorn, as most of Coleridge’s fine chapters are—­on ’the specific symptoms of poetic power elucidated in a critical analysis of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.  In these few pages Coleridge is at the summit of his powers as a critic.  So long as his attention could be fixed on a particular object, so long as he was engaged in deducing his general principles immediately from particular instances of the highest kind of poetic excellence, he was a critic indeed.  Every one of the four points characteristic of early poetic genius which he formulates deserves to be called back to the mind again and again:—­

’The delight in richness and sweetness of sound, even to a faulty excess, if it be evidently original and not the result of an easily imitable mechanism, I regard as a highly favourable promise in the compositions of a young man....

’A second promise of genius is the choice of subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself.  At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author’s personal sensations and experiences the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious pledge, of genuine poetical power....

’Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterise the poet.  They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the effect