orgeous imagery and pageantry here,
the simple directness there, the tameless range of imagination and
fancy, the fierce rush of rhythm:--

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.

And thereafter the spectre of Life-in-Death, the water-snakes, the
rising of the dead men, the snapping of the spell. There had been
nothing like all this before; and in all the hundred years, for all the
great poetry we have seen, we have seen nothing so _new_ as it. _Love_
gave the magnificent opening stanza, the motto and defence at once of
the largest, the most genuine, the most delightful part of poetry. And
_Christabel_, independently of its purple patches, such as the famous
descant on the quarrels of friends, and the portents that mark the
passage of Geraldine, gave what was far more important--a new metre,
destined to have no less great and much more copious influence than the
Spenserian stanza itself. It might of course be easy to pick out
anticipations in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic,
and anapaestic; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how it
seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown by the
well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little of it
recited, at once developed it and established it in _The Lay of the Last
Minstrel_. In verse at least, if not in prose, there is no greater
_master_ than Coleridge.

Robert Southey, the third of this curiously dissimilar trio whom partly
chance and partly choice have bound together for all time, was born at
Bristol on 12th August 1774. His father was only a linen-draper, and a
very unprosperous one; but the Southeys were a respectable family,
entitled to arms, and possessed of considerable landed property in
Somerset, some of which was left away from the poet by unfriendly uncles
to strangers, while more escaped him by a flaw in the entail. His
mother's family, the Hills, were in much better circumstances than his
father, and like the other two Lake Poets he was singularly lucky in
finding helpers. First his mother's brother the Rev. Herbert Hill,
chaplain to the English factory at Lisbon, sent him to Westminster,
where he did very well and made invaluable friends, but lost the regular
advancement to Christ Church owing to the wrath of the head-master Dr.
Vincent at an article which Southey had contributed to a school