composed
above fourteen years. Let me conclude by a hope that he will not longer
delay the publication of a production, of which I can only add my mite
of approbation to the applause of far more competent judges.

[The lines in _Christabel_, Part the First, 43-52, 57, 58, are these--

"The night is chill; the forest bare;
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek--
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, 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."

" ... What sees she there?
There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a silken robe of white."

Byron (_vide ante_, p. 443), in a letter to Coleridge, dated October 27,
1815, had already expressly guarded himself against a charge of
plagiarism, by explaining that lines 521-532 of stanza xix. were written
before he heard Walter Scott repeat _Christabel_ in the preceding June.
Now, as Byron himself perceived, perhaps for the first time, when he had
the MS. of _Christabel_ before him, the coincidence in language and
style between the two passages is unquestionable; and, as he hoped and
expected that Coleridge's fragment, when completed, would issue from the
press, he was anxious to avoid even the semblance of pilfering, and went
so far as to suggest that the passage should be cancelled. Neither in
the private letter nor the published note does Byron attempt to deny or
explain away the coincidence, but pleads that his lines were written
before he had heard Coleridge's poem recited, and that he had not been
guilty of a "wilful plagiarism." There is no difficulty in accepting his
statement. Long before the summer of 1815 _Christabel_ "had a pretty
general circulation in the literary world" (Medwin, _Conversations_,
1824, p. 261), and he may have heard without heeding this and other
passages quoted by privileged readers; or, though never a line of
_Christabel_ had sounded in his ears, he may (as Koelbing points out)
have caught its lilt at second hand from the published works of Southey,
or of Scott himself.

Compare _Thalaba the Destroyer_, v. 20 (1838, iv. 187)--

"What sound is borne on the wind?
Is it the storm that shakes
The thousand oaks of the forest?

* * * *