permanent and elementary conditions of nature and humanity, which
Wordsworth held to be the essence of a poet; as it would be his proper
function to awaken such contemplation in other men--those "moments," as
Coleridge says, addressing him--

Moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The light reflected, as a light bestowed.

The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on the
night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an
individual mind," is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and in
the combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression--

high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted;

wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which
the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the "Lake
poetry." [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically
imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most
sustained effort of this kind.

It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external
nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the
main tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and no
mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the

green light
Which lingers in the west,

and again, of

the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow green,

which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no
defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the
minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--a
closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do
with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no
mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed
and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling
intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley
too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which
followed him. "I had found," Coleridge tells us,

[91]

That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive
Their finer influence from the world within;
Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye
Traces no spot, in which the heart may read
History and prophecy:...

and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and
process, but such minute realism as this-