emotional life, and deepened his sympathy for individual and concrete things in life and nature. As a result, the religious poems of 1797 and 1798 were born of personal experience rather than of abstract speculation. The same principles, as formerly, govern the poet's thought, but they are now rendered by suggestion, and are approached by some simple, deep-felt, personal emotion. The poems are just as religious in spirit, but not so obtrusively religious as the earlier ones. They show a more intimate touch with nature and a far finer sympathy with the concrete objects of nature. The abstract "God diffused through all" of the Religious Musings becomes in Fears in Solitude (1798) "All sweet sensations, all ennobling thoughts, all adoration of the God in Nature," that keep "the heart awake to Love and Beauty;" or, as expressed in This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison (1797):

So my friend

Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem

Less gross than bodily; and of such hues

As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.

It is to be noted especially in Frost at Midnight (1798) how from a very simple situation-himself and his cradled infant at the hearth-fire of his cottage-he rises without seeming effort through personal experience to a grand climax which expresses profoundly and religiously his conception of Unity:

For I was reared

In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

But the highest and final expression of the spirit of Unity and Necessity by Coleridge is to be found in the greatest poem of his life-The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797-8). This poem contains no reasoned religion, no obtrusive theological arguments, but merely the aroma, the fine flavor, the "breath and finer spirit" of the poet's religious meditations. And this almost against his will; for, as suggested in a note, he was consciously attempting to write a work of almost "pure imagination." His imagination, however, did not escape the shadow of all his previous religious musings, and the religious atmosphere of the poem is connected with the thought of all his earlier religious poems-is indeed its logical outcome.

Though dealing with other things besides religion, the poem is full of religious suggestiveness, whose source is not so much the supernatural machinery the poet uses, as that which is represented as taking place in the heart of the mariner. With all its charm, subtlety, unearthly music, and wild adventure, the poem indicates distinguishable stages in the mariner's moral and religious experience by means of relating so wild a tale of strange adventure. Or, to put it otherwise, the wonder is that he has, without doing violence to either, fused such a tale and such an experience into an harmonious whole. If the poem ought to have had no more moral than an Arabian

Night's tale, as Coleridge himself once suggested, it would have had to be completely rewritten and one of its most unique qualities destroyed.

The thing which makes this blending of religious experience and marvelous adventure possible, and successful, is chiefly the character of the mariner-one of the most distinctive creations in modern literature. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the mariner is that in the story he does not act but is constantly acted upona fact which Wordsworth considered a great defect, but which for the purpose of the poem is no defect at all. After the mariner had killed the albatross-an impulsive rather than a deliberate act-spirits and powers, plastic and vast, conjured up by the poet from the ends of the earth, played upon his mind and conscience as on a harp. Though in telling his own story the mariner has power over the will of the wedding-guest and over any who may be "pre-doomed" to listen to him, yet this power comes to him as a visitation and is not in his keeping. He has no will of his own: he is passive to the powers outside himself and the new law of life revealed to him; that is, he is a true Necessitarian:

Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,

Which forced me to begin my tale;

And then it left me free.

Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns:

And till my ghastly tale is told,

This heart within me burns.

I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange powers of speech;

That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me:

To him my tale I teach.

In any other hands but those of Coleridge so passive a character would become insipid. But the mariner is saved from insipidity chiefly by the poet's communicating to him an unusual intensity of feeling. It is no doubt fitting that the ancient man should be "venerable, weather-beaten, and more or less oracular." It is also well that he has a glittering eye endowed with the power of fixing the attention of his listeners and of charming them, for a time, into that suspension of unbelief concerning the external events of the poem which constitutes poetic faith. But it is what goes on behind the glittering eye that really gives the eye its peculiar significance and power. It is what happens within the heart of the mariner that fixes him unforgettably in our imagination and makes him appeal to us humanly. Of the poem Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth: "I dislike all the miraculous parts of it, but the feeling of the man under the operation of such scenery, dragged me along like Tom Pope's whistle. . . . The Ancient Mariner undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was-like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is, that all consciousness of personality is gone." The audacity of Coleridge's art in portraying the character, we may say, was to offset his passivity with such an intensity of feeling that he was on the verge of losing the sense of his own identity. This inward intensity, derived from Coleridge's own inwardness of mind, is the chief source of that exalted and sustained lyricism that gives unusual freshness and perpetual charm to the poem.

Simplicity and childlikeness of spirit further atone for the mariner's passivity. Though the character is old and weather-beaten, he throws himself with the abso

lute faith and complete abandon of a child into the telling of his story. This utter single-mindedness of the mariner bewitches the wedding-guest, and also the reader. Coleridge drank deep of the spirit of the folk ballad, and at no point has he more completely caught the primitive spirit of the ballads than in their childlikeness. It was a difficult feat for the poet to keep his own thought within the circle of the mariner's mind and the mariner's thought within the circle of a child's mind. At places where the mariner approaches generalizations and is in the greatest danger of becoming sophisticated, his thought and language becomes utterly simple and naïve. Such, for example, is the familiar passage near the end of the poem which, though hackneyed by constant quotation, expresses, with artistic grace, the sum of the mariner's religious wisdom. The poem, in short, is the most superb example of sustained naïveté in the language.

The failure to recognize this naïve spirit sufficiently has caused some critics who have taken seriously the moral of the poem to interpret certain important incidents erroneously. The killing, for example, of an albatross that persisted in following a ship for nine days would be considered, according to eighteenth-century ethics, trivial; and according to the scientific ethics of the twentieth century, natural, or necessary, or, at any event, no great matter. But the mariner's ethics is that of a child. He killed the bird impulsively and wantonly. But when his fellow-mariners attributed their fate and the fate of their ship, whether for good or evil, but chiefly for evil, to the killing of the albatross, and accounted the act a crime, he accepted without question their verdict; and straightway the crime became to him monstrous and overwhelming. He had no scale of values, and he suffered.