ry different sort of
sentiment in which he is one with that school, yet all himself, his
sympathy, namely, with the animal world. That was a sentiment
connected at once with the love of outward nature in himself and in the
"Lake School," and its assertion of the natural affections in their
simplicity; with the homeliness and pity, consequent upon [95] that
assertion. The Lines to a Young Ass, tethered--

Where the close-eaten grass is scarcely seen,
While sweet around her waves the tempting green,

which had seemed merely whimsical in their day, indicate a vein of
interest constant in Coleridge's poems, and at its height in his
greatest poems--in Christabel, where it has its effect, as it were
antipathetically, in the vivid realisation of the serpentine element in
Geraldine's nature; and in The Ancient Mariner, whose fate is
interwoven with that of the wonderful bird, at whose blessing of the
water-snakes the curse for the death of the albatross passes away, and
where the moral of the love of all creatures, as a sort of religious
duty, is definitely expressed.

Christabel, though not printed till 1816, was written mainly in the
year 1797: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was printed as a
contribution to the Lyrical Ballads in 1798; and these two poems belong
to the great year of Coleridge's poetic production, his twenty-fifth
year. In poetic quality, above all in that most poetic of all
qualities, a keen sense of, and delight in beauty, the infection of
which lays hold upon the reader, they are quite out of proportion to
all his other compositions. The form in both is that of the ballad,
with some of its terminology, and some also of its quaint conceits.
They connect themselves with that revival of ballad literature, of
which Percy's Relics, and, in another [96] way, Macpherson's Ossian are
monuments, and which afterwards so powerfully affected Scott--

Young-eyed poesy
All deftly masked as hoar antiquity.

The Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a
"romantic" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to that
taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, to
which the "romantic" school in Germany, and its derivations in England
and France, directly ministered. In Coleridge, personally, this taste
had been encouraged by his odd and out-of-the-way reading in the
old-fashioned literature of the marvellous--books like Purchas's
Pilgrims, early voyages l