ng, in a life of many beginnings.
Christabel remained a fragment. In The Ancient Mariner [100] this
unity is secured in part by the skill with which the incidents of the
marriage-feast are made to break in dreamily from time to time upon the
main story. And then, how pleasantly, how reassuringly, the whole
nightmare story itself is made to end, among the clear fresh sounds and
lights of the bay, where it began, with

The moon-light steeped in silentness,
The steady weather-cock.

So different from The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner in regard to this
completeness of effect, Christabel illustrates the same complexion of
motives, a like intellectual situation. Here, too, the work is of a
kind peculiar to one who touches the characteristic motives of the old
romantic ballad, with a spirit made subtle and fine by modern
reflection; as we feel, I think, in such passages as--

But though my slumber had gone by,
This dream it would not pass away--
It seems to live upon mine eye;

and--

For she, belike, hath drunken deep
Of all the blessedness of sleep;

and again--

With such perplexity of mind
As dreams too lively leave behind.

And that gift of handling the finer passages of human feeling, at once
with power and delicacy, which was another result of his finer
psychology, [101] of his exquisitely refined habit of self-reflection,
is illustrated by a passage on Friendship in the Second Part--

Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth;
And constancy lives in realms above;
And life is thorny; and youth is vain;
And to be wroth with one we love,
Doth work like madness in the brain.
And thus it chanced, as I divine,
With Roland and Sir Leoline.
Each spake words of high disdain
And insult to his heart's best brother
They parted--ne'er to meet again!
But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining--
They stood aloof the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder;
A dreary sea now flows between;
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.

I suppose these lines leave almost every reader with a quickened sense
of the beauty and compass of human feeling; and it is the sense of such
richness and beauty which, in spite of his "dejection," in spite of
that burden of his morbid lassitude, accompanies Coleridge himself
thro