Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry; _second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair, and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting, had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--
'And one, the rarest, was a shell Which he, poor child, had studied well: The Shell of a green Turtle, thin And hollow;--you might sit therein, It was so wide, and deep.
'Our Highland Boy oft visited The house which held this prize; and led By choice or chance, did thither come One day, when no one was at home, And found the door unbarred.'
The discord is, in any case, none too apparent; but if one exists, it does not in the least arise from the actual language which Wordsworth has used. If in anything, it consists in a slight shifting of the focus of apprehension, a sudden and scarcely perceptible emphasis on the detail of actual fact, which is a deviation from the emotional key of the poem as a whole. In the next instance the lapse is, however, indubitable:--
'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.