so little imagination did the author possess, that "it depended on the compositor's putting or not putting _a small capital_, whether the words should be personifications or mere abstracts." England's great poets, Spenser for example, had been able to express the most fanciful ideas in the purest, simplest of English; but these newer writers could not express common, everyday thoughts except in such an extraordinarily bad and fantastic style that it seemed as if Echo and Sphinx had laid their heads together to produce it. Coleridge turned with aversion from these attempts to conceal want of imagination under affectation of style. He detested Odes to Jealousy, Hope, Forgetfulness, and all such abstractions. They reminded him of an Oxford poem on the subject of vaccination, which began: "Inoculation! heavenly maid, descend!" Even in the best English poetry of a later day the bad habit of personifying abstractions was too long adhered to. (Shelley, for example, presents us with "the twins Error and Truth.") All these affectations appeared to Coleridge to arise from the custom of writing Latin verses in the public schools. The model style, according to him, was that which expressed natural thoughts in natural language, "neither bookish nor vulgar, neither redolent of the lamp nor of the kennel." The old English ballads in Percy's collection, with their unadulterated natural, popular tone, seemed to him excellent guides. He, too, would fain write in such a tone. It was at this stage that Coleridge was initiated into all Wordsworth's ideas and projects. Wordsworth's was one of those natures which find satisfaction and a sense of security in dogmatic and strongly condemnatory verdicts. His idea of the whole of English poetry after Milton was, that the nation, after producing that great man, had lost the poetic power it, formerly possessed and had preserved only a form of composition, so that poetry had come to mean the art of diction--the poet being judged by the degree of mastery he had attained in that art. Hence there had been an ever more marked departure in metrical composition from the rules of prose. The poet's aim now must be to retrace the path that had been taken, and produce verse which should be distinguished only by its metrical form from the language of daily life. Whilst Coleridge was all for natural melody, Wordsworth went the length of demanding that poetry should be simply rhymed conversation.