wer, is indicative of a change of temper in regard to the
supernatural which has passed over the whole modern mind, and of which
the true measure is the influence of the writings of Swedenborg. What
that change is we may see if we compare the vision by which Swedenborg
was "called," as he thought, to his work, with the ghost which called
Hamlet, or the spells of Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's. The
modern mind, so minutely self-scrutinising, if it is to be affected at
all by a sense of the supernatural, needs to be more finely touched
than was possible in the older, romantic presentment of it. The
spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as

The blot upon the brain,
That will show itself without;

and is understood to be but a condition of one's own mind, for which,
according to the scepticism, latent at least, in so much of our modern
philosophy, the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after
all.

It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, fruit of
his more delicate [99] psychology, that Coleridge infuses into romantic
adventure, itself also then a new or revived thing in English
literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in The Ancient Mariner,
unknown in those older, more simple, romantic legends and ballads. It
is a flower of medieval or later German romance, growing up in the
peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation,
and putting forth in it wholly new qualities. The quaint prose
commentary, which runs side by side with the verse of The Ancient
Mariner, illustrates this--a composition of quite a different shade of
beauty and merit from that of the verse which it accompanies,
connecting this, the chief poem of Coleridge, with his philosophy, and
emphasising therein that psychological interest of which I have spoken,
its curious soul-lore.

Completeness, the perfectly rounded wholeness and unity of the
impression it leaves on the mind of a reader who fairly gives himself
to it--that, too, is one of the characteristics of a really excellent
work, in the poetic as in every other kind of art; and by this
completeness, The Ancient Mariner certainly gains upon Christabel--a
completeness, entire as that of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, or Keats's
Saint Agnes' Eve, each typical in its way of such wholeness or entirety
of effect on a careful reader. It is Coleridge's one great complete
work, the one really finished thi