entioned,[35] and especially in the description
of the heroine's chamber. But the differences are even more apparent.
Coleridge's art is temperate and suggestive, spiritual, too, with an
unequalled power of haunting the mind with a sense of ghostly presences.
In his scene the touches are light and few; all is hurried, mysterious,
shadowy. But Keats was a word painter, his treatment more sensuous than
Coleridge's, and fuller of imagery. He lingers over the figure of the
maiden disrobing, and over the furnishings of her room. The Catholic
elegancies of his poem, as Hunt called them, and the architectural
details are there for their own sake--as pictures; the sculptured dead in
the chapel, the foot-worn stones, the cobwebbed arches, broad hall
pillar, and dusky galleries; the "little moonlight room, pale,
_latticed_, chill"; the chain-drooped lamp:

"The carven angels ever eager-eyed"

that

"Stared, where upon their heads the cornice rests,
With hair blown back and wings put crosswise on their breasts."

Possibly "La Belle Dame sans Merci" borrows a hint from the love-crazed
knight in Coleridge's "Love," who is haunted by a fiend in the likeness
of an angel; but here the comparison is to Keats' advantage. Not even
Coleridge sang more wildly well than the singer of this weird ballad
strain, which has seemed to many critics[36] the masterpiece of this
poet, wherein his "natural magic" reaches its most fascinating subtlety
and purity of expression.

The famous picture of the painted "casement, high and triple-arched" in
Madeline's chamber, "a burst of richness, noiseless, coloured, suddenly
enriching the moonlight, as if a door of heaven were opened," [37] should
be compared with Scott's no less famous description of the east oriel of
Melrose Abbey by moonlight, and the comparison will illustrate a
distinction similar to that already noted between the romanticism of
Coleridge and Scott. The latter is here depicting an actual spot, one of
the great old border abbeys; national pride and the pathos of historic
ruins mingle with the description. Madeline's castle stood in the
country of dream; and it was an "elfin storm from fairyland" that came to
aid the lovers' flight,[38] and all the creatures of his tale are but the

"Shadows haunting fairily
The brain new stuffed in youth with triumphs gay
Of old Romance."

In Keats is the romantic escape, the longing to

"leave the world unseen.
A