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;
The unripe flax, When through its half-transparent stalks, at eve, The level sunshine glitters with green light;
The hornéd Moon, with one bright star Within the nether tip.
And, indeed, Coleridge was aware himself of the extraordinary power which was exercised upon him by external and visible things,--especially by the magic of scenery. He wrote:
"But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!"
I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills ... but my spirit careers, drives and eddies like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion rises up within me.... The further I ascend from animated nature ... the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death?
And he determinedly developed in his theory of poetry, his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. He had accorded to his sleeping babe, a few short months before, that tenderest of all benedictions, that gift of untarnishable joy:
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon:
and he had conversed at great length and frequency with Wordsworth, on what he termed "the two cardinal points of poetry--the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature." He had no greater pleasure possible than to steep himself in "the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us: an inexhaustible treasure," he proclaimed, "but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand." And when his imagination craved some wilder and more romantic outlook than the peaceful village where,