ike Hakluyt's, old naturalists and visionary
moralists, like Thomas Burnet, from whom he quotes the motto of "The
Ancient Mariner, Facile credo, plures esse naturas invisibiles quam
visibiles in rerum universitate, etc." Fancies of the strange things
which may very well happen, even in broad daylight, to men shut up
alone in ships far off on the sea, seem to have occurred to the human
mind in all ages with a peculiar readiness, and often have about them,
from the story of the stealing of Dionysus downwards, the fascination
of a certain dreamy grace, which distinguishes them from other kinds of
marvellous inventions. This sort of fascination The Ancient Mariner
brings to its highest degree: it is the delicacy, the dreamy [97]
grace, in his presentation of the marvellous, which makes Coleridge's
work so remarkable. The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world
in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a
kind of crudity or coarseness. Coleridge's power is in the very
fineness with which, as by some really ghostly finger, he brings home
to our inmost sense his inventions, daring as they are--the skeleton
ship, the polar spirit, the inspiriting of the dead corpses of the
ship's crew. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner has the plausibility,
the perfect adaptation to reason and the general aspect of life, which
belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a
credible experience in our dreams. Doubtless, the mere experience of
the opium-eater, the habit he must almost necessarily fall into of
noting the more elusive phenomena of dreams, had something to do with
that: in its essence, however, it is connected with a more purely
intellectual circumstance in the development of Coleridge's poetic
gift. Some one once asked William Blake, to whom Coleridge has many
resemblances, when either is at his best (that whole episode of the
re-inspiriting of the ship's crew in The Ancient Mariner being
comparable to Blake's well-known design of the "Morning Stars singing
together") whether he had ever seen a ghost, and was surprised when the
famous seer, who ought, one might think, to have seen so many, answered
frankly, "Only [98] once!" His "spirits," at once more delicate, and
so much more real, than any ghost--the burden, as they were the
privilege, of his temperament--like it, were an integral element in his
everyday life. And the difference of mood expressed in that question
and its ans