The Wizard Passions weave an holy spell” ...
though it is impossible to say that the collocation of calm and careless, wizard and holy, would have arrested us had Coleridge made no advance from it, had he remained a minor poet. The combination of mild and wild is a characteristic one, partly instinctive, partly an intellectual desire, as he shows by speaking of a “soft impassioned voice, correctly wild.” The two come quaintly together in his image of,—
“Affection meek
(Her bosom bare, and wildly pale her cheek),”
and nobly in the picture of Joan of Arc,—
“Bold her mien,
And like a haughty huntress of the woods
She moved: yet sure she was a gentle maid.”
Coleridge loved equally mildness and wildness, as I saw them on the one hand in the warm red fields, the gorse smouldering with bloom, the soft delicious greenery of the banks; and on the other hand in the stag’s home, the dark, bleak ridges of heather or pine, the deep-carved coombs. Mildness, meekness, gentleness, softness, made appeals both sensuous and spiritual to the poet’s chaste and voluptuous affections and to something homely in him, while his spirituality, responding to the wildness, branched forth into metaphysics and natural magic. Some time passed before the combining was complete. There was, for example, a tendency to naiveté and plainness, to the uninspired accuracy of “pinky-silver skin” (of a birch tree), and to the matter of fact—
“The Mariners gave it biscuit worms—”