And their practice is no less opposed than their theory; or rather the relation of the two, to theory and practice taken together, is the most astonishing contrast to be found in Poetry. Dante never falsifies his theory for a moment. You cannot find a line, in _Commedia_ or _Vita Nuova_ or anywhere else, where the “panther-quest” of word, and phrase, and line-formation, and stanza-grouping is not evident; you will be put to it to find one where this quest is not consummately successful. And, in following word and phrase and form, Dante never forgets or starves his meaning. He may be sometimes obscure, but never because there is no meaning to discern through the gloom. He may be sometimes technical; but the technicality is never otherwise than the separable garb of a “strange and high” thought and intention. Matter and form with him admit no divorce: their marriage is not the marriage of two independent entities, but the marriage of soul and body. He has no need of the alternation of emotion and tranquillity, of the paroxysm succeeded by the notebook (or interrupted by it and succeeded by the fair copy), because his emotion and his tranquillity are identical, because the tide of his poetry is the tide “too full for sound or foam,” at least for splash or spoondrift. He is methodical down to the counting of syllables in poetic words: and yet who has more poetic madness than he? [Sidenote: _with Wordsworth’s._] The difference in Wordsworth is almost startling; it looks as if it had been “done on purpose.” He does obey his theory, does accept the language of ordinary life.[366] But when he does so, as (almost) everybody admits, he is too often not poetical at all—never in touch with the highest poetry.[367] And (which is extremely remarkable and has not, I think, been remarked by Coleridge or by many other critics) even in these poems he has not the full courage of his opinions. In no single instance does he venture on the experiment of discarding the merely “superadded charm” of metre, of which he has such a low opinion. He never in one single instance relies on the sheer power of “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” on the impetus of “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” _without_ metre. In the form of poetry, which he affects to despise, he is even as these publicans.