wizard. People have wanted to know what "Christabel" means, and how it was
to have ended, and whether Geraldine was a vampire (as I am inclined to
think) or had eyes in her breasts (as Shelley thought). They have wondered
that a poem so transparent in every line should be, as a whole, the most
enigmatical in English. But does it matter very much whether "Christabel"
means this or that, and whether Coleridge himself knew, as he said, how it
was to end, or whether, as Wordsworth declared, he had never decided? It
seems to me that Coleridge was fundamentally right when he said of the
"Ancient Mariner," "It ought to have had no more moral than the Arabian
Nights' tale of the merchant's sitting down to eat dates by the side of a
well, and throwing the shells aside, and lo! a genie starts up, and says he
_must_ kill the aforesaid merchant, because one of the date-shells
had, it seems, put out the eye of the genie's son." The "Ancient Mariner,"
if we take its moral meaning too seriously, comes near to being an
allegory. "Christabel," as it stands, is a piece of pure witchcraft,
needing no further explanation than the fact of its existence.

Rossetti called Coleridge the Turner of poets, and indeed there is in
Coleridge an aerial glitter which we find in no other poet, and in Turner
only among painters. With him colour is always melted in atmosphere, which
it shines through like fire within a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew
on flowers, or a mist of rain in bright sunshine. His images are for the
most part derived from water, sky, the changes of weather, shadows of
things rather than things themselves, and usually mental reflections of
them. "A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket," he said, and it is for
colour and sound, in their most delicate forms, that he goes to natural
things. He hears


"the merry nightingale