leridge had the story complete in his mind, what we
have is a fragment, and does not enable us to divine, as some broken
statues do, the plan of the whole. What it gives us is the romantic
mood, the sense of "witchery by daylight," and this it does more
hauntingly than anything else in the English language. It is a series
of magical and unforgetable pictures. It owes a good deal to the old
verse romances and ballads that so impressed the imagination in those
days of the mediaeval revival, but it was itself a far stronger
influence. It operated as an original force, both by its form and by its
spirit, upon the poetic imagination of the first half of the nineteenth
century more widely and deeply than the work of any other man, Burns and
Keats not excepted. Scott heard it read from manuscript, and the "Lay of
the Last Minstrel," with the series of verse romances that followed, may
almost be called a result of that reading; the verse form of Scott's
romances certainly is. Poe's poetry is as far as the poles removed from
Scott's; yet a close study of Poe's work shows the influence of
"Christabel" to be even deeper here than in the "Lay of the Last
Minstrel."

Coleridge was fully aware of a special power, both of imagination and of
verse-music, in the poem. His attempts to complete it in 1800 brought
persistently to his mind the project of a philosophy of poetry, and
especially of this poem, as we may infer from a letter to Poole in
March, 1801: "I shall ... immediately publish my 'Christabel,' with two
essays annexed to it, on the 'Preternatural' and on 'Metre.'" When the
two cantos were at last printed in 1816, Coleridge wrote in the Preface:
"The metre of the 'Christabel' is not, properly speaking, irregular,
though it may seem so from its being founded on a new principle: namely,
that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the
latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will
be found to be only four. Nevertheless this occasional variation in
number of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of
convenience, but in correspondence with some transition, in the nature
of the imagery or passion." This is not to be taken quite literally. The
accentual principle was assuredly nothing new in English verse, and
syllable-counting, though introduced by Chaucer, had to be reintroduced
by the Renaissance poets and did not become an unquestioned convention
till the latte