to this idea, the narrator of the poetic story must undertake to invest
it. Nor can the unfinished condition in which it was left be fairly held
to account for this, for the characters themselves--the lady Christabel,
the witch Geraldine, and even the baron Sir Leoline himself--are somewhat
shadowy creations, with too little hold upon life and reality, and too
much resemblance to the flitting figures of a dream. Powerful in their
way as are the lines descriptive of the spell thrown over Christabel by
her uncanny guest--lines at the recitation of which Shelley is said to
have fainted--we cannot say that they strike a reader with such a sense of
horror as should be excited by the contemplation of a real flesh-and-blood
maiden subdued by "the shrunken serpent eyes" of a sorceress, and
constrained "passively to imitate" their "look of dull and treacherous
hate." Judging it, however, by any other standard than that of the poet's
own erecting, one must certainly admit the claim of _Christabel_ to
rank very high as a work of pure creative art. It is so thoroughly
suffused and permeated with the glow of mystical romance, the whole
atmosphere of the poem is so exquisitely appropriate to the subject,
and so marvellously preserved throughout, that our lack of belief in
the reality of the scenes presented to us detracts but little from the
pleasure afforded by the artistic excellence of its presentment. It
abounds, too, in isolated pictures of surpassing vividness and grace--
word-pictures which live in the "memory of the eye" with all the
wholeness and tenacity of an actual painting. Geraldine appearing to
Christabel beneath the oak, and the two women stepping lightly across
the hall "that echoes still, pass as lightly as you will," are pictures
of this kind; and nowhere out of Keats's _Eve of St. Agnes_ is
there any "interior" to match that of Christabel's chamber, done as it
is in little more than half a dozen lines. These beauties, it is true,
are fragmentary, like the poem itself, but there is no reason to
believe that the poem itself would have gained anything in its