is the simplicity of the following:

"The moving moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide:
_Softly she was going up_."

"Day after day, day after day
_We stuck_."

"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brandl, "became in
the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The
impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which
the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a
quaint beauty of its own, in its mention of "the creatures of the
calm"; its citation of "the learned Jew Josephus and the Platonic
Constantinopilitan, Michael Psellus," as authorities on invisible
spirits; and in passages like that Dantesque one which tells how the
mariner "in his loneliness and fixedness yearneth towards the journeying
moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onwards; and
everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and
their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter
unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a
silent joy at their arrival."

In "The Ancient Mariner" there are present in the highest degree the
mystery, indefiniteness, and strangeness which are the marks of romantic
art. The period is not strictly mediaeval, for mariners in the Middle
Ages did not sail to the south polar regions or lie becalmed in the
equatorial seas. But the whole atmosphere of the poem is mediaeval. The
Catholic idea of penance or expiation is the moral theme enwrought with