against those single exceptions which bring its generalisations to
nought. When the pigeon-hole will admit every "document" but one, the
case is hard indeed; and it is not too much to say that the _Ancient
Mariner_ is the one document which the pigeon-hole in this instance
declines to admit. If Coleridge had only refrained from writing this
remarkable poem, or if, having done so, he had written more poems like
it, the critic might have ticketed him with a quiet mind, and gone on
his way complacent. As it is, however, the poet has contrived in virtue
of this performance not only to defeat classification but to defy it.
For the weird ballad abounds in those very qualities in which
Coleridge's poetry with all its merits is most conspicuously deficient,
while on the other hand it is wholly free from the faults with which he
is most frequently and justly chargeable. One would not have said in
the first place that the author of _Religious Musings_, still less
of the _Monody on the Death of Chatterton_, was by any means the
man to have compassed triumphantly at the very first attempt the
terseness, vigour, and _naivete_ of the true ballad-manner. To
attain this, Coleridge, the student of his early verse must feel, would
have rather more to retrench and much more to restrain than might be
the case with many other youthful poets. The exuberance of immaturity,
the want of measure, the "not knowing where to stop," are certainly
even more conspicuous in the poems of 1796 than they are in most
productions of the same stage of poetic development; and these
qualities, it is needless to say, require very stern chastening from
him who would succeed in the style which Coleridge attempted for the
first time in the _Ancient Mariner_.

The circumstances of this immortal ballad's birth have been related
with such fulness of detail by Wordsworth, and Coleridge's own
references to them are so completely reconcilable with that account,