of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit....

’The last character ... which would prove indeed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former—­yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree ... is depth and energy of thought.  No man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher.  For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.’

In the context the most striking peculiarity of this enunciation of the distinguishing marks of poetic power, apart from the conviction which it brings, is that they are not in the least concerned with the actual language of poetry.  The whole subject of poetic diction is dropped when Coleridge’s critical, as opposed to his logical, faculty is at work; and, although this Chapter XV is followed by many pages devoted to the analysis and refutation of the Wordsworthian theory and to the establishment of those principles of poetic diction to which we have referred, when Coleridge comes once more to engage his pure critical faculty, in the appreciation of Wordsworth’s actual poetry in Chapter XXII, we again find him ignoring his own principles precisely on those occasions when we might have thought them applicable.

Coleridge 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:—­