On every corse there stood."


Coleridge's marginal gloss to these last stanzas is "The angelic spirits
leave the dead bodies, and appear in their own forms of light."

Once more from Christabel:-


"The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees--no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate."


What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from Coleridge, and
Wordsworth confirms him. It was, says the Preface of 1802, "to present
ordinary things to the mind in an unusual way." In Wordsworth the
miraculous inherent in the commonplace, but obscured by "the film of
familiarity," is restored to it. This translation is effected by the
imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming, as Wordsworth is careful
to warn us, but that power by which we see things as they are. The
authors of The Ancient Mariner and Simon Lee are justified in claiming a
common object. It is to prove that the metaphysical in Shakespeare's