gust of wind sterte up behind
And whistled thro' his bones;
Thro' the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth
Half-whistles and half-groans."

But this crude grotesquerie of horror--quite in the taste of that day,
the day of "Monk" Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe--Coleridge's finer poetical
judgment soon rejected.

190--*Her lips were red*, etc. Life-in-Death--who wins the Mariner,
while Death wins his shipmates--is conceived as a witch, something after
the fashion of Geraldine in "Christabel" or Duessa in "The Faerie
Queene," but wilder, stranger than either; a thing of startling and evil
beauty. Spenser's pages of description, however, give no such vivid
image of loathsome loveliness as do the first three lines of this
stanza. "Her skin was as white as leprosy" is a feat in suggestion.

10, 199, marginal gloss--*within the courts of the Sun*. Between the
tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

210--*with one bright star Within the nether tip*. An interesting
case of poetical illusion. No one, of course, ever saw a star _within_
the tip of the horned moon. Yet a good many readers, until reminded of
their astronomy, think they have seen this phenomenon. Coleridge
apparently knew that the human mind would receive it as experience. The
phrase is no slip on his part; the earlier editions had instead "almost
atween the tips," which is astronomically justifiable, but in "Sibylline
Leaves" and later he wrote it as in the text.

222--*And every soul, it passed me by, Like the whizz of my
cross-bow!* It was an ancient belief, imaginatively revived by
romantic poets, that when a person died his soul could be seen, or
heard, or both, as it left the body, Cf. Keats's "Eve of St. Agnes,"
first stanza; Rossetti's "Sister Helen;" and Kipling's "Danny Deever."

11, 226--*And thou art long*, etc. "For the last two lines of this
stanza," runs. Coleridge's note to the passage in "Sibylline Leaves," "I
am indebted to Mr. Wordsworth. It was on a delightful walk from Nether
Stowey to Dulverton, with him and his sister, in the autumn of 1797,
that this poem was planned, and in part composed." Wordsworth in later
years declared that he contributed also lines 13-16, "and four or five
lines more in different parts of the poem, which I could not now point
out."

245--*or ever*. "Or" here is not the adversative conjunction but an
entirely different word, an archaic variant of "ere," meaning "before."

250--*For the sky and the sea*, etc. A