f "such stuff as dreams are made on." Industrious
commentators have indeed traced features of "The Ancient Mariner" to
various sources. Coleridge's friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a
skeleton ship. Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in
Shelvocke's voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black
albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring
fair weather. Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis'
"Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene," furnished a hint; and
surmises--what seems unlikely--that Coleridge had read a certain epistle
by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which
came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who
reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the
crew, and had since been navigated by spirits.

But all this is nothing and less than nothing. "The Ancient Mariner" is
the baseless fabric of a vision. We are put under a spell, like the
wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of
mid-ocean. Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds
unreal and far on. What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide
sea? The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes. Did the mariner
really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but
the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor
on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water
brooks on the level brine? No one can tell; for he is himself the only
witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth. One conjectures that
no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again. Nay, was not
the mariner, too, a spectre? Now he is gone, and what was all this that
he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or
did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some
invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone.
Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy
and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says
Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly
understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The
Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19]
There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in
this way. Some