It must not be forgotten that Coleridge is never fantastic. The fantastic
is a playing with the imagination, and Coleridge respects it. His intellect
goes always easily as far as his imagination will carry it, and does not
stop by the way to play tricks upon its bearer. Hence the conviction which
he brings with him when he tells us the impossible. And then his style, in
its ardent and luminous simplicity, flexible to every bend of the spirit
which it clothes with flesh, helps him in the idiomatic translation of
dreams. The visions of Swedenborg are literal translations of the
imagination, and need to be retranslated. Coleridge is equally faithful to
the thing seen and to the laws of that new world into which he has
transposed it.

"The Ancient Mariner" is the most sustained piece of imagination in the
whole of English poetry; and it has almost every definable merit of
imaginative narrative. It is the only poem I know which is all point and
yet all poetry; because, I suppose, the point is really a point of mystery.
It is full of simple, daily emotion, transported, by an awful power of
sight, to which the limits of reality are no barrier, into an unknown sea
and air; it is realized throughout the whole of its ghastly and marvellous
happenings; and there is in the narrative an ease, a buoyancy almost, which
I can only compare with the music of Mozart, extracting its sweetness from
the stuff of tragedy; it presents to us the utmost physical and spiritual
horror, not only without disgust, but with an alluring beauty. But in
"Christabel," in the first part especially, we find a quality which goes
almost beyond these definable merits. There is in it a literal spell, not
acting along any logical lines, not attacking the nerves, not terrifying,
not intoxicating, but like a slow, enveloping mist, which blots out the
real world, and leaves us unchilled by any "airs from heaven or blasts from
hell," but in the native air of some middle region. In these two or three
brief hours of his power out of a lifetime, Coleridge is literally a