The image in the first line looks rude and unpoetical, but will be felt by anybody who has strolled observantly through a farmyard—say on a Sunday summer afternoon—and has noticed a disused wheel leaning against a wall. Wordsworth shows himself not afraid of the commonplace. A great object may gain by comparison with one which is superficially lower or even mean—nature with a cart-wheel.
Went over the hills to Bicknoller—a sunny, hazy day—and the Bristol Channel was in a mist. The note of the cuckoo was unceasing. Down in the valley at Bicknoller the hedges and banks of the lanes are in the most ardent stage of spring. Everything is pressing forward with joyous impetuosity, and yet is satisfied with what it is at the present moment and is completely at rest in it. Along this path to Bicknoller the _Ancient Mariner_ was begun. The most wonderful piece of criticism on record is perhaps that of Mrs. Barbauld on the poem. She objected to it because it had no moral. Coleridge replied: ‘In my judgment the poem had too much; and the only, or chief fault, if I might say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination. It ought to have no more moral than the Arabian Nights’ tale of the merchant’s sitting down to eat dates by the side of a well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he _must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, _because_ one of the date-shells had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie’s son.’
To the first draft of _Youth and Age_, written in 1823, there is a little prose introduction, a reminiscence of the Quantocks, which is a lovely example of the way in which one sensation gains by description in terms of another. ‘ . . . At earliest dawn . . . the first skylark . . . was a Song-Fountain, dashing up and sparkling to the Ear’s eye, in full column or ornamented shaft of sound in the order of Gothic Extravaganza, out of sight, over the Cornfields on the descent of the Mountain on the other side—out of sight, tho’ twice I beheld its mute shoot downward in the sunshine like a falling star of silver.’
Coleridge! Coleridge! How empty do the sweeping judgments passed on him appear if we recollect that by Wordsworth, Dorothy, Charles and Mary Lamb, he was honoured and fervently loved. If a man is loved by any human being condemnation is rash, and we ought at least to be silent.
