realistic-supernatural; but no one can help feeling how much the author
is aided by his "broker's clerk" style of description, and by the
familiar Parisian scenes among which he makes his hero move. It is
easier to compass verisimilitude in the Palais-Royal than on the South
Pacific, to say nothing of the thousand assisting touches, out of place
in rhyme and metre, which can be thrown into a prose narrative. The
_Ancient Mariner_, however, in spite of all these drawbacks, is as
real to the reader as is the hero of the _Peau de Chagrin_; we are
as convinced of the curse upon one of the doomed wretches as upon the
other; and the strange phantasmagoric haze which is thrown around the
ship and the lonely voyager leaves their outlines as clear as if we saw
them through the sunshine of the streets of Paris. Coleridge triumphs
over his difficulties by sheer vividness of imagery and terse vigour of
descriptive phrase--two qualities for which his previous poems did not
prove him to possess by any means so complete a mastery. For among all
the beauties of his earlier landscapes we can hardly reckon that of
intense and convincing truth. He seems seldom before to have written,
as Wordsworth nearly always seems to write, "with his eye on the
object;" and certainly he never before displayed any remarkable power
of completing his word-picture with a few touches. In the _Ancient
Mariner_ his eye seems never to wander from his object, and again
and again the scene starts out upon the canvas in two or three strokes
of the brush. The skeleton ship, with the dicing demons on its deck;
the setting sun peering "through its ribs, as if through a dungeon-
grate;" the water-snakes under the moonbeams, with the "elfish light"
falling off them "in hoary flakes" when they reared; the dead crew, who
work the ship and "raise their limbs like lifeless tools"--everything
seems to have been actually _seen_, and we believe it all as the
story of a truthful eye-witness. The details of the voyage, too, are
all chronicled with such order and regularity, there is such a diary-