the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."

In all literature there has been no finer passage written on the
wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in _Christabel_
relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir Leoline. After reading
this poem and _Kubla Khan_, an unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four
lines, we feel that the closing lines of _Kubla Khan_ are peculiarly
applicable to Coleridge:--

"For he on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."

Swinburne says of _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_: "When it has been
said that such melodies were never heard, such dreams never dreamed,
such speech never spoken, the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable.
There is a charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent
submission and wonder."

General Characteristics of his Poetry.--Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge
is not the poet of the earth and the common things of life. He is the
poet of air, of the regions beyond the earth, and of dreams. By no
poet has the supernatural been invested with more charm.

He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the world of morals;
of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. The motherless Christabel in
her time of danger dreams a beautiful truth of this divinely governed
world:--

"But this she knows, in joys and woes,
That saints will aid if men will call:
For the blue sky bends over all."

His references to nature are less remarkable for description or
photographic details than for suggestiveness and diffused charm, such
as we find in these lines:--

"...the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune."

Wordsworth wrote few poems simpler than _The Ancient Mariner_. A
stanza like this seems almost as simple as breathing:--

"The moving moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide;
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside."

Prose.--Coleridge's prose, which is almost all critical or
philosophical, left its influence on the thought of the nineteenth
century. When he was a young man, he went to Germany and studied
philosophy with a continued vigor unusual for him. He became an
idealist and used the idealistic teachings of the German
metaphysicians to combat the utilitarian