The next step in the meaning of this word was really taken on the day upon which Coleridge, with his head full of ancient witchery, was introduced to another poet with his heart full of mountains. Under their joint influence we can behold that despised habit of looking at life through the spectacles of the old Romances, the mysterious faculty of superimposing on Nature a magical colour or mood created in the observer by the _fictions_ of genius or the myths of bygone ages, expanding until it includes the contemplation of Nature impassioned by any effluence arising from within—it may be emotion or it may be the individual memory. It was the philosophy of the Lake School that the perception of Nature—that is to say of all in Nature that is not purely mechanical—depends upon what is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep. To a creation apprehended as automatic by the senses and the reason, only _imagination_ could Add the gleam, The light that never was on sea or land; for imagination was “essentially vital, even as all objects (_as_ objects) are essentially fixed and dead”.[78] Imagination was, in fact, _organic_; and the application of this adjective to the inner world has not been traced farther back than Coleridge, who, in his lectures on Shakespeare’s plays, emphasized the mistake of confounding “mechanical regularity with organic form”. But perhaps the most brilliant, even epigrammatic, expression which has ever been given to the everlasting war between the unconscious, because creative, vital principle and the conscious, because destructive, calculating principle, is contained in four lines from a little poem of Wordsworth’s called _The Tables Turned_: Sweet is the lore which nature brings: Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things— We murder to dissect. And so it is in the philosophy and poetry of Romanticism that we first feel a true understanding, not indeed of the process itself, but of the results of that process, which has been traced in this book under the name of “internalization”. Slowly the divers of the Romantic expedition brought up to the surface of consciousness that vast new cosmos which had so long been blindly forming in the depths. It was a cosmos in which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved out of Nature and into man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece, the witches and fairies and charms and enchantments of Romance—all these had been locked safely in man’s bosom, there to sleep until the trump of Romanticism sounded its call to imagination to give back their teeming life to Nature. “O Lady”, wrote Coleridge in that most heartrending of all poems, wherein, like the disconsolate knight awaking on the barren heath, he reports the decay in himself of this very power: