lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular--

"'And listened like a three years' child:
The Mariner had his will.'

"These trifling contributions, all but one, which Mr. C. has with
unnecessary scrupulosity recorded,[3] slipped out of his mind, as they
well might. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the
same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it
would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate
from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog.... The
_Ancient Mariner_ grew and grew till it became too important for
our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds;
and we began to think of a volume which was to consist, as Mr.
Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural
subjects." Except that the volume ultimately determined on was to
consist only "partly" and not "chiefly" of poems on supernatural
subjects (in the result, as has been seen, it consisted "chiefly" of
poems upon natural subjects), there is nothing in this account which
cannot be easily reconciled with the probable facts upon which De
Quincey bases his hinted charge against Coleridge in his _Lake
Poets_. It was not Coleridge who had been reading Shelvocke's
_Voyages_, but Wordsworth, and it is quite conceivable, therefore,
that the source from which his friend had derived the idea of the
killing of the albatross may (if indeed he was informed of it at the
time) have escaped his memory twelve years afterwards, when the
conversation with De Quincey took place. Hence, in "disowning his
obligations to Shelvocke," he may not by any means have intended to
suggest that the albatross incident was his own thought. Moreover, De
Quincey himself supplies another explanation of the matter, which we