thing inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white
Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20]

Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical
idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost
all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of
coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the
plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to
the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience
in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has
become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself
without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for
which--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our
modern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_
after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism,
the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into
romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English
literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner'
unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a
flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the
peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and
putting forth in it wholly new qualities."

In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal
is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs.
Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge
admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that,
artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy
tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayeth
well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still
more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity
of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen
thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will
die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed,
was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of
"Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient
Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands,