O many are the poets that are sown
By nature men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the facility divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,
Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led
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 {83} 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."
This was, however, only a Gadshill robbery,--stealing stolen goods. The
following epigram is said to be by Mr. Hole, in a MS. collection made by
Spence (penes me), and it appeared first in print in _Terræ Filius_,
from whence Dr. Salter copied it in his _Confusion worse Confounded_, p.
88:--
"Thy verses are eternal, O my friend!
For he who reads them, reads them to no end."
In _The Crypt_, a periodical published by the late Rev. P. Hall, vol. i.
p. 30., I find the following attributed to Coleridge, but I know not on
what authority, as it does not appear among his collected poems:--