by circumstance to take the height,
The measure of themselves, &c.
Wordsworth's Excursion, B. i.
This admired passage has its prototype in the following from the Lettere di Battista Guarini, who points to a thought of similar kind in Dante:—
"O quante nolili ingegni si perdono che riuscerebbe mirabili [in poesia] se dal seguir le inchinazione loro non fossero, ò dà loro appetiti ò da i Padri loro sviati."
Coleridge, in his Bibliographia Literaria, 1st ed., vol. i. p. 28., relates a story of some one who desired to be introduced to him, but hesitated because he asserted that he had written an epigram on "The Ancient Mariner," which Coleridge had himself written and inserted in The Morning Post, to this effect:—
"Your poem must eternal be
Dear Sir! it cannot fail;
For 'tis incomprehensible,
And without head or tail."