understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' odes. 'The
Bard' once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure." [19]
There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in
this way. Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white
Pater Noster and St. Peter's sister in Chaucer's night-spell.[20]

Pater subtly connects Coleridge's poetic method with his philosophical
idealism. "The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost
all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of
coarseness or crudeness, . . . 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' has the
plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to
the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience
in our dreams. . . . The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has
become plausible, as 'the spot upon the brain that will show itself
without,' and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for
which--according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our
modern philosophy--the so-called real things themselves are but _spectra_
after all. It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism,
the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into
romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English
literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in 'The Ancient Mariner'
unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It is a
flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the
peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and
putting forth in it wholly new qualities."

In "The Ancient Mariner," as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal
is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience. Mrs.
Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge
admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that,