f the feeling of guilty solitude.

A well-known expression of such a mood you find in Kipling's lyric of
the "Poor little sheep that have gone astray." In these verses the
outcast sons of good families, the "gentlemen-rankers," dwell together
in an agonised companionship of common loneliness. Their guilt and
their lost homes are for them inseparably associated.

Or again: Beneath all the fantastic imagery of Coleridge's "Ancient
Mariner," the poet uses a perfectly recognisable type of the sense of
guilt as the means to make his tale of wonders seem, despite all its
impossibilities, human and even plausible. The incidents are the
miracles of a magic dream; but the human nature depicted is as real as
is the torment of any guilty conscience. Somehow--no matter how, or
under how arbitrary conditions--the hero has committed a crime
without precisely intending it to be a crime. His tale is one of a
young man's adventurous insolence. His deed has all the too familiar
characters of the typical sins of wayward youth. And that is why the
gay young wedding guest must hear his tale. He--the mariner--in his
own youth, had consciously meant to be only a little wanton and cruel.
He awakened, as many a light-minded youth later awakes, to find that,
as a fact, he had somehow struck at the very centre of life, at the
heart of love, at the laws that bind the {69} world together, at the
spirit of the universe. When one thus awakes, he sees that nature and
God are against him. But, worst of all, he has become a curse to his
fellows; and in turn they curse him; and then they leave him alone
with the nightmare life in death of utter solitude. To his mind there
are no living men. He sees about him only "the curse in a dead man's
eye." What life he can still see is no longer, to his morbid eyes,
really human:

"The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie;
And a thousand, thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I."

The Ancient Mariner's escape from the horrors of this despair, the
beginnings of his salvation, date from the first movings of love in
his heart toward all living beings. His salvation is won when, at the
end, he finds God along with the goodly company at the kirk. In brief,
the curse of his guilt is to be "alone on a wide, wide sea." His
salvation comes in preaching love and companionship, and in uniting
himself hereby to the God who loves all things both great and small.

Now one does not often think