from pity to adoration, fellowship with man and beast, rectitude, duty. The Ancient Mariner carries us on a voyage most adventurous, over weird waters on an unknown plane of being haunted by strange sights and sounds, only that we may return to our home-harbor, competent to know that the last lines of the poem express no platitude, but the end of all adventure:

He prayeth best who loveth best
All things, both great and small.

The strange hints of Christabel, with its almost unbearable suggestion of beauty and horror, are placed in a setting of simple girlish compassion and hospitality, and the lines that have most made their way into the general heart describe the common and enduring pain of broken friendship. Coleridge's verse is no empty fantasy: at its most faery-like, it holds in solution the dearest feelings and achievements of our everyday human life. In his own words, his mind "can call goodness its play-fellow."

III.

What has been said in general applies to the special poems included in this volume, and they require little further comment. The Ancient Mariner is not given here because it is already included in another volume of this series, with the excellent editorship of the late William Vaughn Moody.

Kubla Khan, so Coleridge tells us, was composed in a dream at the time when his genius was at its height, in 1798. It has thus a special psychological interest;

and its charm is in the dream-like images which its interwoven melodies evoke. There is even a remembered vision within the dream itself, so that we are kept at two removes from waking reality! No one need seek here for coherence or definite meaning; the human element, on which we just said that Coleridge's poetry is usually founded, is not here to be found. But the final couplet gives, as no pedestrian speech can do, the impression which such verse conveys. The sensitiveness to sound in which Coleridge excelled most poets here blends with images of sight and motion to create a mood of delighted awe, which is the final triumph always desired by romantic art. “It has just enough meaning to give it bodily existence,' writes a critic: "otherwise it would be disembodied music. It seems to hover in the air like one of the island enchantments of Prospero.. . Lamb, who tells us how Coleridge repeated it 'so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into my parlor when he says or sings it to me,' doubted whether it would 'bear daylight.' It seemed to him that such witchcraft could hardly outlast the night. It has outlasted the century, and may still be used as a touchstone; it will determine the poetic value of any lyric poem you place beside it."*

The first part of Christabel was written in 1798. the second probably in 1801; the poem remains unfinished, perhaps to our loss, perhaps to our gain. It was originally meant for a second volume of Lyrical Ballads, which never materialized, partly because Coleridge could not finish his work on time. For

* Arthur Symons: The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.

years it remained in manuscript, enthralling and influencing all who heard it, and was finally in 1816 published in its fragmentary condition at the request of Byron. Coleridge himself liked the first canto best. "Certainly," he said, "it is more perfect, has more of the true wild weird spirit than the last." This is unquestionably true; the first canto is pure wizardry, "witchery by daylight," as the Quarterly Review remarked with more felicity than it usually showed in its criticisms. The second, though spirited and musical, is more in the ordinary vein of the romantic ballad, as handled, for instance, by Sir Walter Scott. We must however remember, in making any such comparison, that Scott had received his inspiration in part from this very poem, and that the originality of Coleridge is unquestioned. Moreover the lively narrative of poems like Marmion or The Lady of the Lake, or the pleasing use of faery charm in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, can hardly be compared with the elusive quality of Christabel, verse which transports us less into the medieval past than into a world inhabited by pure imaginative conceptions of beauty or horror. *"In Christabel there is a literal spell, not acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying, not intoxicating, but like a slow enveloping mist, which blots out the real world and leaves us unchilled by any 'airs from heaven or blasts from hell,' but in the native air of some middle region. I know no other verse in which the effects of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley you feel sings like a bird; Blake like a child or an angel; but Coleridge certainly writes music."

* Arthur Symons, The Romantic Movement in English Poetry.

Critics discuss whether or no Coleridge knew what was to be the outcome of the story. Perhaps he did, though Wordsworth denied it; we never shall know. Yet in itself, reduced to plain prose, the story of the witch who weaves an evil enchantment round a fair and gentle maid, alienating from her her father's love, and possibly separating her from her lover, is no more wild or strange than many another tale told in verse or prose during a period fascinated like the first quarter of the nineteenth century with strange romantic themes. The spell is in the treatment and the metre. Coleridge once dropped a pregnant hint: he said that the poem was "partly founded on the idea that the virtuous of the world save the wicked,” -a hint allowing us to believe that the discomfiture of his "sweet Christabel" might have been temporary, and that in the end the boundless pity of her maiden heart might have redeemed the doubtless spell-bound Geraldine. At another time, Coleridge suggested a different and longer plan, which will be found in the Notes. Meanwhile, for further introduction to the poem, we shall do best to turn to his own Preface:

CHRISTABEL.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION. 1816.

The first part of the following poem was written in the year 1797, at Stowey, in the county of Somerset. The second part, after my return from Germany, in

the year 1800, at Keswick, Cumberland. Since the latter date my poetic powers have been, till very lately, in a state of suspended animation. But as, in my very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness, no less than with the liveliness of a vision; I trust that I shall be able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come, in the course of the present year.1

It is probable, that if the poem had been finished at either of the former periods, or if even the first and second part had been published in the year 1800, the impression of its originality would have been much greater than I dare at present expect. But for this, I have only my own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or servile imitation from myself. For there is amongst us a set of critics, who seem to hold, that every possible thought and image is traditional; who have no notion that there are such things as fountains in the world, small as well as great; and who would therefore charitably derive every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in some other man's tank. I am confident, however, that as far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, would permit me to address them in this doggerel version of two monkish Latin hexameters :

1 But this hope was illusory.