Note 50 — JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Reading edition
His best poetry was written when he was under the immediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when he speaks of ‘those who have been so well pleased that I should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills into their main stream’ (Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C., vol. i, pp. 5-6). Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:
The singing masons building roofs of gold.
This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers’ (Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography). Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in 1837, ‘My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost to disease.’ One cannot help thinking that his training in these niceties was begun by Coleridge.