more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality.
The next step in the meaning of this word was really taken on the day upon which Coleridge, with his head full of ancient witchery, was introduced to another poet with his heart full of mountains. Under their joint influence we can behold that despised habit of looking at life through the spectacles of the old Romances, the mysterious faculty of superimposing on Nature a magical colour or mood created in the observer by the fictions of genius or the myths of bygone ages, expanding until it includes the contemplation of Nature impassioned by any effluence arising from within—it may be emotion or it may be the individual memory. It was the philosophy of the Lake School that the perception of Nature—that is to say of all in Nature that is not purely mechanical—depends upon what is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep. To a creation apprehended as automatic by the senses and the reason, only imagination could
Add the gleam,
The light that never was on sea or land;
for imagination was “essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead”.[78]
Imagination was, in fact, organic; and the application of this adjective to the inner world has not been traced farther back than Coleridge, who, in his lectures on Shakespeare’s plays, emphasized the mistake of confounding “mechanical regularity with organic form”. But perhaps the most brilliant, even epigrammatic, expression which has ever been given to the everlasting war between the unconscious, because creative, vital principle and the conscious, because destructive, calculating principle, is contained in four lines from a little poem of Wordsworth’s called The Tables Turned:
Sweet is the lore which nature brings:
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things—