Coleridge enumerates Wordsworth's defects one by one. The first, he
says, is an inconstancy of style. For a moment he appears to invoke his
principles: 'Wordsworth sinks too often and too abruptly to that style
which I should place in the second division of language, dividing it
into the three species; _first_, that which is peculiar to poetry;
_second_, that which is proper only in prose; and _third_, the neutral
or common to both.' But in the very first instance which Coleridge
gives we can see that the principles have been dragged in by the hair,
and that they are really alien to the argument which he is pursuing. He
gives this example of disharmony from the poem on 'The Blind Highland
Boy' (whose washing-tub in the 1807 edition, it is perhaps worth noting,
had been changed at Coleridge's own suggestion, with a rash contempt of
probabilities, into a turtle shell in the edition of 1815):--
'And one, the rarest, was a shell
Which he, poor child, had studied well:
The Shell of a green Turtle, thin
And hollow;--you might sit therein,
It was so wide, and deep.
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