be any comparison between the two. In so far as we regard poetry as
contributing not merely to the pleasure of the mind but to its health
and strength--in so far as we regard it in its capacity not only to
delight but to sustain, console, and tranquillise the human spirit--
there is, of course, as much difference between the idealistic and the
realistic forms of poetry as there is between a narcotic potion and a
healing drug. The one, at best, can only enable a man to forget his
burdens; the other fortifies him to endure them. It is perhaps no more
than was naturally to be expected of our brooding and melancholy age,
that poetry (when it is not a mere voluptuous record of the subjective
impressions of sense) should have become almost limited in its very
meaning to the exposition of the imaginative or spiritual aspect of the
world of realities; but so it is now, and so in Coleridge's time it
clearly was _not_. Coleridge, in the passage above quoted, shows
no signs of regarding one of the two functions which he attributes to
poetry as any more accidental or occasional than the other; and the
fact that the realistic portion of the _Lyrical Ballads_ so far
exceeded in amount its supernatural element, he attributes not to any
inherent supremacy in the claims of the former to attention but simply
to the greater industry which Wordsworth had displayed in his special
department of the volume. For his own part, he says, "I wrote the
_Ancient Mariner_, and was preparing, among other poems, the
_Dark Ladie_ and the _Christabel_, in which I should have more
nearly realised my ideal than I had done in my first attempt. But
Mr. Wordsworth's industry had proved so much more successful, and the
number of the poems so much greater, that my compositions, instead of
forming a balance, appeared rather an interpolation of heterogeneous
matter." There was certainly a considerable disparity between the
amount of their respective contributions to the volume, which, in fact,
contained nineteen pieces by Wordsworth and only four by Coleridge.