human associations had given both variety and an additional interest to natural
objects which in the passion and appetite of the first love they had seemed to
him neither to need or permit. The occasional obscurities, which had risen
from an imperfect control over the resources of his native language, had almost
wholly disappeared, together with that worse defect of arbitrary and illogical
phrases, at once hackneyed and fantastic, which hold so distinguished a place
in the technique of ordinary poetry and will, more or less, alloy the earlier
poems of the truest genius, unless the attention has been specifically directed
to their worthlessness and incongruity. I did not perceive anything particular
in the mere style of the poem alluded to during its recitation, except indeed
such difference as was not separable from the thought and manner; and the
Spenserian stanza which always, more or less, recalls to the reader's mind
2. Descriptive Sketches (1815 version), lines manuscript until Wordsworth published a revised 332ff. version in 1842 under the title 'Guilt and Sorrow.' 3. In Greek, Psyche is the common name for the An excerpt from Salisbury Plain was printed as soul and the butterfly [Coleridge's note]. 'The Female Vagrant,' in Lyrical Ballads (1798). 4. The meeting occurred in September 1795. 6. Wordsworth's 'Tintern Abbey,' lines 76ff. 5. Salisbury Plain (1793-94), which was left in
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476 / SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
Spenser's own style, would doubtless have authorized in my then opinion a more frequent descent to the phrases of ordinary life than could, without an ill effect, have been hazarded in the heroic couplet. It was not however the freedom from false taste, whether as to common defects or to those more properly his own, which made so unusual an impression on my feelings immediately, and subsequently on my judgment. It was the union of deep feeling with profound thought; the fine balance of truth in observing with the imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed; and above all the original gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and with it the depth and height of the ideal world, around forms, incidents, and situations of which, for the common view, custom had bedimmed all the luster, had dried up the sparkle and the dewdrops. 'To find no contradiction in the union of old and new, to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all his works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprang forth at the first creative fiat,7 characterizes the mind that feels the riddle of the world and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar;
With sun and moon and stars throughout the year,
And man and woman;8
this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talents. And therefore it is the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental no less than of bodily convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling from the time that he has read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure
To snow that falls upon a river
A moment white?then gone forever!9
In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission. Truths of all others the most awful and mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, are too often considered as so true, that they lose all the life and efficiency of truth and lie bedridden in the dormitory of the soul side by side with the most despised and exploded errors.' The Friend, p. 76, no. 5.1
[ON FANCY AND IMAGINATION THE INVESTIGATION OF THE DISTINCTION IMPORTANT TO THE FINE ARTS]
This excellence, which in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings is more or less predominant and which constitutes the character of his mind, I no sooner felt than I sought to understand. Repeated meditations led me first to suspect (and a more intimate analysis of the human faculties, their appropriate marks, functions, and effects, matured my conjecture into full conviction) that fancy and
7. The first divine command: 'Let there be light.' 9. Altered from Burns's 'Tam o' Shanter,' lines 8. Altered from Milton's sonnet 'To Mr. Cyriack 61-62. Skinner upon His Blindness.' 1. A periodical published by Coleridge (1809-10).
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BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA / 47 7
imagination were two distinct and widely different faculties, instead of being,
according to the general belief, either two names with one meaning, or at
furthest the lower and higher degree of one and the same power. It is not, I
own, easy to conceive a more apposite translation of the Greek phantasia than
the Latin imaginatio; but it is equally true that in all societies there exists an
instinct of growth, a certain collective unconscious good sense working pro
gressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning which
