, entirely different from the
one he had in mind; but he was equal to the emergency and delivered an
unusually good address.

Young men used to flock to him in his old age to draw on his copious
stores of knowledge and especially to hear him talk about German
philosophy. Carlyle visited him for this purpose and speaks of the
"glorious, balmy, sunny islets, islets of the blest and the
intelligible," which occasionally emerged from the mist of German
metaphysics. He spent the last eighteen years of his life in Highgate
with his kind friend, Dr. Gillman, who succeeded in regulating and
decreasing the amount of opium which Coleridge took. He died there in
1834 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Westminster Abbey does not
have the honor of the grave of a single one of the great poets of this
romantic age.

Poetry.--_The Ancient Mariner_ (1798) is Coleridge's poetical
masterpiece. It is also one of the world's masterpieces. The
supernatural sphere into which it introduces the reader is a
remarkable creation, with its curse, its polar spirit, the phantom
ship, the seraph band, and the magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem
is a triumph of romantic genius. The meter, the rhythm, and the music
have well-nigh magical effect. Almost every stanza shows not only
exquisite harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing with
those weird scenes which romanticists love.

The moral interest of the poem is not inferior to its other charms.
The Mariner killed the innocent Albatross, and we listen to the same
kind of lesson as Wordsworth teaches in his _Hart-Leap Well_:--

"The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shat him with his bow.'"

The noble conclusion of the poem has for more than a hundred years
continued to influence human conduct:--

"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all."

His next greatest poem is the unfinished _Christabel_ (1816). A lovely
maiden falls under the enchantments of a mysterious Lady Geraldine;
but the fragment closes while this malevolent influence continues. We
miss the interest of a finished story, which draws so many readers to
_The Ancient Mariner_, although _Christabel_ is thickly sown with
gems. Lines like these are filled with the airiness of nature:--

"There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf,