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The strange or violent or sonorous word, however splendid in itself, may not fit the curve of the sonnet in which it appears: it may be like a big red apple crowded into the toe of a Christmas stocking. Nor must the sonnet lean towards either obscurity the vice of Elizabethan sonnets, or obviousness the vice of Wordsworth's sonnets after 1820.
Coleridge does not hold Wordsworth's belief that the language of common speech and of poetry should be identical. He shows that Wordsworth does better than follow his own theories. Yet, when he considers both the excellencies and the defects of Wordsworth's verse, Coleridge's verdict of praise is substantially that of the twentieth century.
"A Stream of Tendency" can never satisfy the idea of God, as ordinary humanity conceives it. It is not in human nature to love a stream of tendency, or worship it, or ask boons of it; or to credit it with powers of design, volition, or creation. A prayer beginning "Stream" would sound as odd as Wordsworth's ode beginning "Spade."
Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.
Presently, after so much mounting of steps, and threading of embowered paths and lanes of flowers, we were ushered into the grounds immediately around the actual house. And the man first took us upon that memorable terraced lawn, in great part made by Wordsworth's own hands. It is circular, and the turf, like thick-piled velvet, yielding to the feet and of delicious green smooth and soft.
I maintain, on the other hand, that what strikes me with admiration, what establishes in my opinion Wordsworth's superiority, is the great and ample body of powerful work which remains to him, even after all his inferior work has been cleared away. He gives us so much to rest upon, so much which communicates his spirit and engages ours! This is of very great importance.
Thus Sir Henry Lawrence prized above all other compositions Wordsworth's "Character of the Happy Warrior," which he endeavored to embody in his own life. It was ever before him as an exemplar. He thought of it continually, and often quoted it to others.
There is, too, as may be found imbedded even in Wordsworth's dullest work, many a line of the truest poetical quality, such as that on Newton's statue in the silent Chapel of Trinity College "The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone."
The Prologue is a confession, like that of Wordsworth's great Ode, that a glory has passed away from the earth. When first he set eyes on Asolo, some fifty years previously, the splendour of Italian landscape seemed that of Terror with beauty, like the Bush Burning yet unconsumed Now, while the beauty remains, the flame is extinct "the Bush is bare."
The pomps and vanities of this world had it against love or liking, and she gave me up. I thank God that the pomps and vanities prevailed; for this happy chance gave me Mary, my sweet Wordsworthian damsel, found, like the violet or the celandine, by the wayside, in Wordsworth's own country.
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