stantly
Blake's haunting _Songs of Innocence_. But there is this difference between
the two poets,--in Blake we have only a dreamer; in Coleridge we have the
rare combination of the dreamer and the profound scholar. The quality of
this early poetry, with its strong suggestion of Blake, may be seen in such
poems as "A Day Dream," "The Devil's Thoughts," "The Suicide's Argument,"
and "The Wanderings of Cain." His later poems, wherein we see his
imagination bridled by thought and study, but still running very freely,
may best be appreciated in "Kubla Khan," "Christabel," and "The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner." It is difficult to criticise such poems; one can only
read them and wonder at their melody, and at the vague suggestions which
they conjure up in the mind. "Kubla Khan" is a fragment, painting a
gorgeous Oriental dream picture, such as one might see in an October
sunset. The whole poem came to Coleridge one morning when he had fallen
asleep over Purchas, and upon awakening he began to write hastily,

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and he never
finished the poem.

"Christabel" is also a fragment, which seems to have been planned as the
story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcerer, in the
shape of the woman Geraldine. It is full of a strange melody, and contains
many passages of exquisite poetry; but it trembles with a strange, unknown
horror, and so suggests the supernatural terrors of the popular hysterical
novels, to which we have referred. On this account it is not wholesome
reading; though one flies in the face of Swinburne and of other critics by
venturing to suggest such a thing.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is Coleridge's chief contribution to the
_Lyrical Ballads_ of 1798, and is one of the world's masterpieces. Though
it introduces the reader to a supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a
crew of dead men, the overhanging curse of the albatross, the polar spirit,
and the magic breeze, it nevertheless manages to create a sense of absolute
reality concerning these manifest absurdities. All the mechanisms of the
poem, its meter, rime, and melody are perfect; and some of its descriptions
of the lonely sea have never been equaled. Perhaps we should say
suggestions, rather than descriptions;