with what consummate art are we left to imagine the physical traces
which the mariner's long agony had left behind it by a method far more
terrible than any direct description--the effect, namely, which the
sight of him produces upon others--

"I moved my lips--the Pilot shrieked
And fell down in a fit;
The holy Hermit raised his eyes,
And prayed where he did sit.

"I took the oars: the Pilot's boy,
_Who now doth crazy go_,
Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
'Ha! ha!' quoth he, 'full plain I see,
The Devil knows how to row.'"

Perfect consistency of plan, in short, and complete equality of
execution, brevity, self-restraint, and an unerring sense of artistic
propriety--these are the chief notes of the _Ancient Mariner_, as
they are _not_, in my humble judgment, the chief notes of any poem
of Coleridge's before or since. And hence it is that this masterpiece
of ballad minstrelsy is, as has been said, so confounding to the
"pigeon-holing" mind.

The next most famous poem of this or indeed of any period of Coleridge's
life is the fragment of _Christabel_, which, however, in spite of
the poet's own opinion on that point, it is difficult to regard as "a
more effective realisation" of the "natural-supernatural" idea. Beautiful
as it is, it possesses none of that human interest with which, according