The poet then proceeds to unite in a manner true in nature and in fact, yet equally strange and startling, two opposite and contending feelings:
"And pleasures flow in so thick and fast Upon his heart, that he at last Must needs express his love's excess, With words of unmeant bitterness."
The habit, if it may be so called, alluded to in these lines, must be more or less familiar to most persons as an anomaly in our nature; the habit, I mean, ridiculous as it may appear, of applying evil, though "unmeant" names to children in a transport of affection. This is a trait in the human character which, slight, and faint, and trifling as it may seem, the acute mind of Coleridge has seized, and analysed, and exhibited in its legitimate development. Whether the propensity, thus delicately described, be really innocent in itself, or whether it be only the παρεκβασις, or excess, which the poet held to be the guilty state, it is hardly worth while stopping to inquire; still we cannot avoid his own startling suggestion,
"What, if in a world of sin (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Such giddiness of heart and brain"
springs generally from some evil source, implies the existence of some evil principle. Familiar as this habit, this instance of "giddiness of heart and brain," is to most of us, I am not aware that it has ever been expressed in poetry, or even in prose, by any other writer; if so, this passage is a rarity, similar to those four stanzas in Gray's Elegy, beginning, "Yet e'en these bones," &c., of which Dr. Johnson says, "they are to me original; I have never seen the notions in any other place; yet he that reads them here persuades himself that he has always felt them."
The author then endeavours to offer some explanation of this phenomenon, and carries out the germ of ill to its full extent, as exemplified in Sir Leoline:
"Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together Thoughts so all unlike each other; To mutter and mock a broken charm, To dally with wrong that does no harm; Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty, _At each wild word to feel within_ _A sweet recoil of love and pity_."
It appears to me that the third line in this passage, from its being introduced too early (if I may venture to say so), on this account unnecessarily increases the difficulty; it occurs before the idea has been sufficiently developed; while it belongs rather to the result of this evil leaven than to the explanation of it, with which the poet is here engaged. The "charm" to which he alludes is, of course, the tie that binds us to the object of affection, and which forbids us to speak any but words of love and tenderness.