er_, the supernatural is handled
with even greater subtlety than in _Christabel_. The reader is led to
feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic sea, the line between the
earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to discover
for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were merely
the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of spirits.
Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists. The poet Swinburne--than
whom there can be no higher authority on this point (though he is rather
given to exaggeration)--pronounces _Kubla Khan_, "for absolute melody and
splendor, the first poem in the language."

Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker and
one of the most voluminous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking
in inspiration, and his big Oriental epics, _Thalaba_, 1801, and the
_Curse of Kehama_, 1810, are little better than wax-work. Of his
numerous works in prose, the _Life of Nelson_ is, perhaps, the best, and
is an excellent biography.

Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake
Poets by residence or social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of
_Blackwood's_, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the
banks of Windermere. He was an {239} athletic man of out-door habits, an
enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His admiration
of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in
his _Isle of Palms_, 1812, and his other poetry.

One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De Quincey,
who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up
his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the
cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank. De Quincey was
a shy, bookish little man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses
one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child's helplessness and a
child's sharp observation. He was, above all things, a magazinist. All
his writings, with one exception, appeared first in the shape of
contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary criticisms, and
miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied. The most famous of
them was his _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_, published as a
serial in the _London Magazine_, in 1821. He had begun to take opium, as
a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from
18