My voice proclaims How exquisitely the individual mind (And the progressive powers, perhaps, no less Of the whole species) to the external world Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too, The external world is fitted to the mind; And the creation, by no lower name Can it be called, which they with blended might Accomplish. In Wordsworth this took the form of an unbroken dreaming over the aspects and transitions of nature--a reflective, though altogether unformulated, analysis of them. [86] There are in Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling how potent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius--"felt in the blood and felt along the heart." My whole life I have lived in quiet thought! The stimulus which most artists require of nature he can renounce. He leaves the ready-made glory of the Swiss mountains that he may reflect glory on a mouldering leaf. He loves best to watch the floating thistledown, because of its hint at an unseen life in the air. Coleridge's temperament, aei en sphodra orexei,+ with its faintness, its grieved dejection, could never have been like that. My genial spirits fail; And what can these avail To lift the smothering weight from off my breast? It were a vain endeavour, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life whose fountains are within. Wordsworth's flawless temperament, his fine mountain atmosphere of mind, that calm, sabbatic, mystic, wellbeing which De Quincey, [87] a little cynically, connected with worldly (that is to say, pecuniary) good fortune, kept his conviction of a latent intelligence in nature within the limits of sentiment or instinct, and confined it to those delicate and subdued shades of expression which alone perfect art allows. In Coleridge's sadder, more purely intellectual, cast of genius, what with Wordsworth was sentiment or instinct became a philosophical idea, or philosophical formula, developed, as much as possible, after the abstract and metaphysical fashion of the transcendental schools of Germany.