ll teach you how to think upon this subject." This
fault, if I am right, is in a ten-thousandth worse degree to be found in
Sterne, and in many novelists and modern poets, who continually put a
sign-post up to show where you are to feel. They set out with assuming
their readers to be stupid,--very different from "Robinson Crusoe," the
"Vicar of Wakefield," "Roderick Random," and other beautiful, bare
narratives. There is implied, an unwritten compact between author and
reader: "I will tell you a story, and I suppose you will understand it."
Modern novels, "St. Leons" and the like, are full of such flowers as
these,--"Let not my reader suppose;" "Imagine, if you can, modest," etc,
I will here have done with praise and blame, I have written so much only
that you may not think I have passed over your book without
observation.... I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his "Ancient
Marinere," a "Poet's Reverie;" it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's
declaration that he is not a lion, but only the scenical representation
of a lion. What new idea is gained by this title but one subversive of
all credit--which the tale should force upon us--of its truth!

For me, I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading
it, I was totally possessed with it for many days. I dislike all the
miraculous part of it; but the feelings of the man under the operation
of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Pipe's magic whistle. I
totally differ from your idea that the "Marinere" should have had a
character and a profession. This is a beauty in "Gulliver's Travels,"
where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the
"Ancient Marinere" undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all
individuality or memory of what he was,--like the state of a man in a
bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness
of personality is gone. Your other observation is, I think as well, a
little unfounded: the "Marinere," from being conversant in supernatural
events, _has_ acquired a supernatural and strange cast of _phrase_, eye,
appearance, etc., which frighten the "wedding guest." You will excuse my
remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary,
with a prose apology, to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see.

To sum up a general opinion of the second volume, I do not feel any one
poem in it so forcibly as the "Ancient Marinere" and "The Mad Mother,"
and the "Lines at Tintern