The victory remained with Bowles, not
because he had won it by argument, but because opinion had changed, and
changed probably once and for all.[17]

Coleridge's four contributions to the "Lyrical Ballads" included his
masterpiece, "The Ancient Mariner." This is the high-water mark of
romantic poetry; and, familiar as it is, cannot be dismissed here without
full examination. As to form, it is a long narrative ballad in seven
"fyts" or parts, and descends from that "Bible of the romantic
reformation," Bishop Percy's "Reliques." The verse is the common ballad
stanza--eights and sixes--enriched by a generous use of medial rhyme and
alliteration:

"The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free:
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea";

varied and prolonged, moreover, by the introduction of additional lines
with alternate riming, with couplets and sometimes with triplets. There
are many five-lined and six-lined stanzas, and one--the longest in the
poem--of nine lines. But these metric variations are used with
temperance. The stanza form is never complex; it is built up naturally
from the ballad stanza upon which it rests and to which it constantly
returns as its norm and type. Of the one hundred and forty-two stanzas
in the poem, one hundred and six are the ordinary four-lined stanzas of
popular poetry. The language, too, is not obtrusively archaic as it is
in Chatterton and some of the Spenserians; at most an occasional "wist"
or "eftsoons"; now and then a light accent, in ballad fashion, on the
final syllable of a rime-word like mariner or countrie. There is no
definite burden, which would have been out of place in a poem that is
narrative and not lyrical; but the ballad habits of phrase repetition and
question and answer are sparingly employed.[18] In reproducing the
homely diction of old popular minstrelsy, Coleridge's art was nicer than
Scott's and more perfect at every point. How skilfully studied, _e.g._
is the simplicity of the following:

"The moving moon went up the sky
And nowhere did abide:
_Softly she was going up_."

"Day after day, day after day
_We stuck_."

"The naive artlessness of the Middle Ages," says Brandl, "became in
the hands of the Romantic school, an intentional form of art." The
impression of antiquity is heightened by the marginal gloss which
the poet added in later editions, composed in a prose that has a
qu