’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 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.