These are two sufficiently striking points; but they are not so striking as the third. Wordsworth _is_ a great poet; he _has_ moments of all but the sublimest—for this argument we need certainly not grudge to say of the sublimest—poetry. He can bathe us in the light of setting suns, and introduce us even to that which never was on sea and land;[368] he can give us the full contact, the full ecstasy, the very “kiss of the spouse.” But in no single instance, again, does he achieve these moments, except—as Coleridge has pointed out to some extent, and as can be pointed out without shirking or blenching at one “place” of poetry—at the price of utterly forgetting his theory, of flinging it to the tides and the winds, of plunging and exulting in poetic diction and poetic arrangement. [Sidenote: _The comparison fatal to Wordsworth as a critic._] So we can only save Wordsworth the poet—in which salvage there is fortunately not the slightest difficulty—at the expense of Wordsworth the critic. Even in these curious documents of critical suicide there are excellent critical utterances _obiter_, and some even of the propositions in the very argument itself are separately, if not in their context, justifiable. He might, if he could have controlled himself, have made a very valuable exposure, not merely of false poetic diction, but of that extremely and monotonously _mannerised_ poetic diction which, though not always bad in its inception and to a certain extent, becomes so by misusage and overusage. He might have developed his polemic against the personification of Gray and others with real advantage. He might have arranged a conspectus of the sins of eighteenth-century poetic diction, which would have been a most valuable pendant to Johnson’s array of the extravagances of the Metaphysicals. He might—if he had carried out and corrected that theory of his of the necessity of antecedent “powerful feelings” in the poet—have produced a “Paradox of the Poet” which would have been as true as Diderot’s on the Actor, and have had far greater value. But he did none of these things; and what he did do is itself not even a paradox—it is a paralogism. [Sidenote: _Other critical places in Coleridge._]