unge so much more vigorous, as to outdo
all his former outdoings. So it seems to be with the new school, or, as
they may be termed, the wild or lawless poets. After we had been
admiring their extravagance for many years, and marvelling at the ease
and rapidity with which one exceeded another in the unmeaning or
infantine, until not an idea was left in the rhyme--or in the insane,
until we had reached something that seemed the untamed effusion of an
author whose thoughts were rather more free than his actions--forth
steps Mr Coleridge, like a giant refreshed with sleep, and as if to
redeem his character after so long a silence, ('his poetic powers having
been, he says, from 1808 till very lately, in a state of suspended
animation,' p. v.) and breaks out in these precise words--

''Tis the middle of night by the castle clock,
And the owls have awaken'd the crowing cock;
Tu ---- whit! ---- Tu ---- whoo!
And hark, again! the crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.'
'Sir Leoline, the Baron rich,
Hath a toothless mastiff bitch;
From her kennel beneath the rock
She makes answer to the clock,
Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour:
Ever and aye, moonshine or shower,
Sixteen short howls, not over loud;
Some say she sees my lady's shroud.'
'Is the night chilly and dark?
The night is chilly, but not dark.' p. 3, 4.

It is probable that Lord Byron may have had this passage in his eye,
when he called the poem 'wild' and 'original;' but how he discovered it
to be 'beautiful,' is not quite so easy for us to imagine.

Much of the art of the wild writers consists in sudden
transitions--opening eagerly upon some topic, and then flying from it
immediately. This indeed is known to the medical men, who not
unfrequently have the care of them, as an unerring symptom. Accordingly,
here we take leave of the Mastiff Bitch, and lose sight of her entirely,
upon the entrance of another personage of a higher degree,

'The lovely Lady Christabel,
Whom her father loves so well'--

And who, it seems, has been rambling about all night, having, the night
before, had dreams about her lover, which 'made her moan and _leap_.'
While kneeling, in the course of her rambles, at an old oak, she hears a
noise on the other side of the stump, and going round, finds, to her
great surprize, another fair damsel in white silk, but with her dress
and hair in some disorder; at the mention