artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy
tale. The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals--"He prayeth
well who loveth well," etc. But the punishment of the mariner, and still
more of the mariner's messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity
of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen
thus: "People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will
die a lingering death by starvation." The moral, as might be guessed,
was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of
"Hart-Leap Well." Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write "The Ancient
Mariner" jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were
contributed by Wordsworth. But he wanted to give the mariner himself
"character and profession"; and to have the dead seamen come to life and
sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon
Coleridge's airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on
these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether.
If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it
perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures,
as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the
omnipresence of God's mercy; in the passage, _e.g._,

"O wedding guest! this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea," etc.--

where the thought is the same as in Cowper's "Soliloquy of Alexander
Selkirk," even to the detail of the "church-going bell."

The first part of "Christabel" was written in 1797; the second in 1800;
and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816.
Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript. Coleridge used to
read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about. We have