Moments awful, Now in thy inner life, and now abroad, When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received The light reflected, as a light bestowed. The entire poem from which these lines are taken, "composed on the night after Wordsworth's recitation of a poem on the growth of an individual mind," is, in its high-pitched strain of meditation, and in the combined justice and elevation of its philosophical expression-- high and passionate thoughts To their own music chanted; wholly sympathetic with The Prelude which it celebrates, and of which the subject is, in effect, the generation of the spirit of the "Lake poetry." [90] The Lines to Joseph Cottle have the same philosophically imaginative character; the Ode to Dejection being Coleridge's most sustained effort of this kind. It is in a highly sensitive apprehension of the aspects of external nature that Coleridge identifies himself most closely with one of the main tendencies of the "Lake School"; a tendency instinctive, and no mere matter of theory, in him as in Wordsworth. That record of the green light Which lingers in the west, and again, of the western sky, And its peculiar tint of yellow green, which Byron found ludicrously untrue, but which surely needs no defence, is a characteristic example of a singular watchfulness for the minute fact and expression of natural scenery pervading all he wrote--a closeness to the exact physiognomy of nature, having something to do with that idealistic philosophy which sees in the external world no mere concurrence of mechanical agencies, but an animated body, informed and made expressive, like the body of man, by an indwelling intelligence. It was a tendency, doubtless, in the air, for Shelley too is affected by it, and Turner, with the school of landscape which followed him. "I had found," Coleridge tells us, [91] That outward forms, the loftiest, still receive Their finer influence from the world within; Fair ciphers of vague import, where the eye Traces no spot, in which the heart may read History and prophecy:... and this induces in him no indifference to actual colour and form and process, but such minute realism as this-- The thin grey cloud is spread on high, It covers but not hides the sky. The moon is behind and at the full; And yet she looks both small and dull; or this, which has a touch of "romantic" weirdness-- Nought was green upon the oak But moss and rarest misletoe or this-- There is not wind enough to twirl The one red leaf, the last of its clan, That dances as often as dance it can, Hanging so light, and hanging so high, On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky or this, with a weirdness, again, like that of some wild French etcher--