With both these great lights of criticism Coleridge agrees almost as thoroughly as Wordsworth disagrees with them: and it is proper here to fulfil the promise which was made[365] of a consideration of Wordsworth’s work in reference to Dante specially, but with extension to Longinus as well. The collision of Wordsworth with Longinus appears in the very title of the famous little treatise. Fight as we may about the exact meaning of ὕψος, it must be evident, to poets and pedlars alike, that it never can apply to the “ordinary language of real life”; struggle as Wordsworthians may, they never can establish a _concordat_ between the doctrine of the _Preface_ and the doctrine of the “beautiful word.” But as Longinus was not specifically writing of Poetry, and as in reference to Poetry he was writing from his own point of view only, on a special function or aspect of Poetry and Rhetoric alike, he does not meet the Apostle of the Ordinary full tilt and weapon to weapon. I have said that I do not know whether, when Wordsworth wrote the _Preface_, he knew the _De Vulgari_ or not. If Coleridge had known it at the time, he probably would have imparted his knowledge in the celebrated Nether Stowey talks: but his own reference, itself not suggestive of a very thorough appreciation, is twenty years later. And as Wordsworth was a perfectly fearless person, and had not a vestige of an idea that any created thing had authority sufficient to overcrow W. W., he would pretty certainly have rebuked this Florentine, and withstood him to his face, if he had known his utterances. [Sidenote: _The_ Preface _compared more specially with the_ De Vulgari,] But, on the other hand, Dante himself might almost have been writing with the _Preface_ before him (except that had he done so Wordsworth would probably have been at least in Purgatory), considering the directness, the almost rude lie-circumstantial of the antidote. “Take the ordinary language, especially of rustic men,” says Wordsworth. “Avoid rustic [“silvan”] language altogether,” says Dante, “and even of ‘urban’ words let only the noblest remain in your sieve.” “If you have Invention, Judgment, and half a dozen other things,” every one of which has been possessed in more or less perfection by most of the great writers of the world whether in prose or poetry, “metrical expertness will follow as a matter of course,” says Wordsworth. “You must, after painfully selecting the noblest words and arranging them in the noblest style, further arrange them in the best line that experience and genius combined can give you, and yet further build these lines into the artfullest structure that art has devised,” says Dante. “Poetry is spontaneous utterance,” says he of Cockermouth. “Poetry, and the language proper for it, is a regular ‘panther-quest,’ an elaborate and painful toil,” says the Florentine. [Sidenote: _and Dante’s practice_]