The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may be
dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant as
a whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a
mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless
Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings
her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield
and went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land." [25]

The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to
"Love." The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest."
There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of
an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The
Ancient Mariner," and incidentally some things of Chatterton's. Lines of
a specifically romantic colouring are of course to be found scattered
about nearly everywhere in Coleridge; like the musical little song that
follows the invocation to the soul of Alvar in "Remorse":

"And at evening evermore,
In a chapel on the shore,
Shall the chanters sad and saintly--
Yellow tapers burning faintly--
Doleful masses chant for thee,
_Miserere Domine_!"

or the wild touch of folk poesy in that marvellous opium dream, "Kubla
Khan"--the "deep romantic chasm":

"A savage place, as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted