t Highgate in 1834, at the age of sixty-two.

Coleridge was a many-sided genius, and perhaps the world has benefited
as largely by his powers as a thinker as by his gift for poetry. He
did much both by talking and writing to broaden English thought, and
his keen and suggestive criticism of other authors, of Shakespeare
especially, has been of high value to lovers of literature. As a poet
he is distinguished for the rare quality of his imagination and the
wonderful music of his verse.

ARGUMENT OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

The argument, or plot, of the poem is as follows:[*]

Three guests were on their way to a wedding, when one of them--the
bridegroom's nearest relative--was stopped by a Mariner with long gray
beard and glittering eye, who constrained him to listen to his story.
The Mariner once set sail in a ship bound southward. After crossing
the equator the vessel was driven by strong winds toward the south
pole, and was finally hemmed in by icebergs. An albatross which
appeared at this time brought good luck: the ice split and the ship
sailed northward. The Mariner, for no apparent reason, shot the bird
of good omen. At first his comrades declared that he had done a
hellish deed, but when the fog cleared away they justified him,
believing that the fog had been brought by the bird. In this way they
became accomplices in his crime. By killing the albatross the Mariner
had offended the Spirit of the South Pole, who now followed the ship
"nine fathom deep" to make sure that vengeance was meted out to the
guilty man. As a sign of the Mariner's guilt the sailors fastened
about his neck the dead bird. The vessel was now in the Pacific Ocean.
On nearing the equator she was becalmed, and before long all the
sailors were dying of thirst. Suddenly a skeleton ship appeared in
sight, having on board Death and Life-in-Death. The two spectres were
throwing dice to see which should possess the doomed Mariner.
Life-in-Death won, and the Mariner was hers. If Death had won, his
life would soon have ended; as it was, existence for him was to
mean--for a time at least--life in the midst of the dead. No sooner
had the spectre bark shot by than his comrades, four times fifty living
men, dropped lifeless one by one. For seven days and seven nights he
suffered agonies from the curse in their stony eyes; but he could not
die, and he could not pray.

One day, while watching some water snakes at play, he was charmed with
the