seen its influence upon Scott. Byron too admired it greatly, and it was
by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment,
finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the
public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats' poem regarded the crone

"Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book,
As spectacled she sits in chimney nook."

"Christabel" is more distinctly mediaeval than "The Ancient Mariner," and
is full of Gothic elements: a moated castle, with its tourney court and
its great gate

. . . "ironed within and without,
Where an army in battle array had marched out":

a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who
steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her
betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a
white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden.

If "The Ancient Mariner" is a ballad, "Christabel" is, in form, a _roman
d'aventures_, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the
octosyllabic couplet. These variations, Coleridge said, were not
introduced wantonly but "in correspondence with some transition, in the
nature of the imagery or passion." A single passage will illustrate this:

"They passed the hall that echoes still,
Pass as lightly as you will.
The brands were flat, the brands were dying
Amid their own white ashes lying;