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Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
page 54 of 477 (11%)
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long perspective glittering, shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those Eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant strives to shun
The west, that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot, like coals of fire.

The poetic Psyche, in its process to full development, undergoes as
many changes as its Greek namesake, the butterfly [20]. And it is
remarkable how soon genius clears and purifies itself from the faults
and errors of its earliest products; faults which, in its earliest
compositions, are the more obtrusive and confluent, because as
heterogeneous elements, which had only a temporary use, they
constitute the very ferment, by which themselves are carried off. Or
we may compare them to some diseases, which must work on the humours,
and be thrown out on the surface, in order to secure the patient from
their future recurrence. I was in my twenty-fourth year, when I had
the happiness of knowing Mr. Wordsworth personally, and while memory
lasts, I shall hardly forget the sudden effect produced on my mind, by
his recitation of a manuscript poem, which still remains unpublished,
but of which the stanza and tone of style were the same as those of
The Female Vagrant, as originally printed in the first volume of the
Lyrical Ballads. There was here no mark of strained thought, or forced
diction, no crowd or turbulence of imagery; and, as the poet hath
himself well described in his Lines on revisiting the Wye, manly
reflection and human associations had given both variety, and an
additional interest to natural objects, which, in the passion and
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