As fills a father's eyes with light."
The poet then proceeds to unite in a manner true in nature and in fact, yet equally strange and startling, two opposite and contending feelings:
"And pleasures flow in so thick and fast
Upon his heart, that he at last
Must needs express his love's excess,
With words of unmeant bitterness."
The habit, if it may be so called, alluded to in these lines, must be more or less familiar to most persons as an anomaly in our nature; the habit, I mean, ridiculous as it may appear, of applying evil, though "unmeant" names to children in a transport of affection. This is a trait in the human character which, slight, and faint, and trifling as it may seem, the acute mind of Coleridge has seized, and analysed, and exhibited in its legitimate development. Whether the propensity, thus delicately described, be really innocent in itself, or whether it be only the παρεκβασις, or excess, which the poet held to be the guilty state, it is hardly worth while stopping to inquire; still we cannot avoid his own startling suggestion,
"What, if in a world of sin
(O sorrow and shame should this be true!)
Such giddiness of heart and brain"