SOURCE: "The Bird and the Dæsmon," in The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, 1927. Reprint by Vintage Books, 1959, pp. 201-20.

In the following essay, Lowes discusses the source material that inspired The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, insisting that its dæmonic imagery exemplifies "the voyaging, Neoplatonizing, naively scientific spirit of the closing eighteenth century."

Across the course of the voyage, just where its great loop swings around the southern termination of the continent, the albatross comes through the fog. And the shooting of the albatross sets the forces of the invisible world in motion. And the action of those forces is in turn bound up with the normal evolution, in experience, of cause and consequence. The albatross, in a word,—"that white phantom [which] sails in all imaginations," as Herman Melville in an eloquent passage calls it—binds inseparably together the...