tabel," was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry. It is seen
in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their
tales, but in single lines and images. In the first stanza of the "Lay"
Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in "Christabel"--"Jesu Maria
shield her well!" In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret
steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood,
gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal,
will remind all readers of "Christabel." The dialogue between the river
and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies
which the "Mariner" hears in his trance. The couplet

"The seething pitch and molten lead
Reeked like a witch's caldron red."

is, of course, from Coleridge's

"The water, like a witch's oils,
Burned green and blue and white."

In "The Lord of the Isles" Scott describes the "elvish lustre" and "livid
flakes" of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the
description, in "The Ancient Mariner," of the sea snakes from which

"The elvish light
Fell off in hoary flakes."

The most direct descendant of "Christabel" was "The Eve of St. Agnes."
Madeline's chamber, "hushed, silken, chaste," recalls inevitably the
passage in the older poem:

"The moon shines dim in the open air,
And not a moonbeam enters here.
But they without its light can see
The chamber carved so curiously,
Carved with figures strange and sweet,
All made out of the carver's brain,
For a lady's chamber meet:
The lamp with twofold silver chain
Is fastened to an angel's feet."

The rest of Coleridge's ballad work is small in quantity and may be
dismissed briefly. "Alice du Clos" has good lines, but is unimportant as
a whole. The very favourite poem "Love" is a modern story enclosing a
mediaeval one. In the moonshine by the ruined tower the guileless
Genevieve leans against the statue of an armed man, while her lover sings
her a tale of a wandering knight who bore a burning brand upon his shield
and went mad for the love of "The Lady of the Land." [25]

The fragment entitled "The Dark Ladie" was begun as a "sister tale" to
"Love." The hero is a "knight that wears the griffin for his crest."
There are only fifteen stanzas of it, and it breaks off with a picture of
an imaginary bridal procession, whose "nodding minstrels" recall "The
Ancient Mariner," and incidentally som