passed since the poem was begun. Coleridge had been to Germany and had
settled at Keswick. The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he
took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon
himself. The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully
manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which
he had set out. In particular it is observable that, while there is no
mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to
Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities
familiar enough in Wordsworth's poetry, but strangely out of place in
"Christabel." It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir
Leoline's castle from fairyland to Cumberland.[24] There is one noble
passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his
"Farewell" to Lady Byron:

"Alas! they had been friends in youth," etc.

But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with
the romantic context. They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a
lace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears.

The example of "The Ancient Mariner," and in a still greater degree of
"Christabel," was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seen
in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their
tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay"
Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Maria
shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret
steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood,
gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal,
will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river
and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies