were preparing their share in the literary revolution. In those same
years (1795-98) Wordsworth and Coleridge were wandering together over the
Somerset downs and along the coast of Devon, catching glimpses of the sea
towards Bristol or Linton, and now and then of the skeleton masts and
gossamer sails of a ship against the declining sun, like those of the
phantom bark in "The Ancient Mariner." The first fruits of these walks
and talks was that epoch-making book, the "Lyrical Ballads"; the first
edition of which was published in 1798, and the second, with an
additional volume and the famous preface by Wordsworth, in 1800. The
genesis of the work and the allotment of its parts were described by
Coleridge himself in the "Biographia Literaria" (1817), Chapter XIV.

"During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours our
conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the
power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to
the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by
the modifying colours of imagination. . . . The thought suggested itself
that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the
incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; . . .
for the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary
life. . . . It was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to
persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic. . . . With
this view I wrote 'The Ancient Mariner,' and was preparing, among other
poems, 'The Dark Ladie' and the 'Christabel,' in which I should have more
nearly realized my ideal than I had done in my first attempt."

Coleridge's contributions to romantic poetry are few though precious.
Weighed against the imposing array of Scott's romances in prose and
verse,[2] they seem like two or three little gold coins put into the
scales to balance a handful of silver dollars. He stands for so much in