It is not a mere inequality and imperfection of style like that which
so seriously detracts from the pleasure of reading Byron. Nor is it
that the thought is often _impar sibi_--that, like Wordsworth's,
it is too apt to descend from the mountain-tops of poetry to the flats
of commonplace, if not into the bogs of bathos. In both these respects
Coleridge may and does occasionally offend, but his workmanship is, on
the whole, as much more artistic than Byron's as the material of his
poetry is of more uniformly equal value than Wordsworth's. Yet, with
almost the sole exception of the _Ancient Mariner_, his work is in
a certain sense more disappointing than that of either. In spite of his
theory as to the twofold function of poetry we must finally judge that
of Coleridge, as of any other poet, by its relation to the actual.
Ancient Mariners and Christabels--the people, the scenery, and the
incidents of an imaginary world--may be handled by poetry once and
again to the wonder and delight of man; but feats of this kind cannot--
or cannot in the Western world, at any rate--be repeated indefinitely,
and the ultimate test of poetry, at least for the modern European
reader, is its treatment of actualities--its relations to the world of
human action, passion, sensation, thought.
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