still running very freely, may best be appreciated in “Kubla Khan,” “Christabel,” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”  It is difficult to criticise such poems; one can only read them and wonder at their melody, and at the vague suggestions which they conjure up in the mind.  “Kubla Khan” is a fragment, painting a gorgeous Oriental dream picture, such as one might see in an October sunset.  The whole poem came to Coleridge one morning when he had fallen asleep over Purchas, and upon awakening he began to write hastily,

    In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
    A stately pleasure-dome decree: 
    Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
    Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.

He was interrupted after fifty-four lines were written, and he never finished the poem.

“Christabel” is also a fragment, which seems to have been planned as the story of a pure young girl who fell under the spell of a sorcerer, in the shape of the woman Geraldine.  It is full of a strange melody, and contains many passages of exquisite poetry; but it trembles with a strange, unknown horror, and so suggests the supernatural terrors of the popular hysterical novels, to which we have referred.  On this account it is not wholesome reading; though one flies in the face of Swinburne and of other critics by venturing to suggest such a thing.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is Coleridge’s chief contribution to the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, and is one of the world’s masterpieces.  Though it introduces the reader to a supernatural realm, with a phantom ship, a crew of dead men, the overhanging curse of the albatross, the polar spirit, and the magic breeze, it nevertheless manages to create a sense of absolute reality concerning these manifest absurdities.  All the mechanisms of the poem, its meter, rime, and melody are perfect; and some of its descriptions of the lonely sea have never been equaled.  Perhaps we should say suggestions, rather than descriptions; for Coleridge never describes things, but makes a suggestion, always brief and always exactly right, and our own imagination instantly supplies the details.  It is useless to quote fragments; one must read the entire poem, if he reads nothing else of the romantic school of poetry.

Among Coleridge’s shorter poems there is a wide variety, and each reader must be left largely to follow his own taste.  The beginner will do well to read a few of the early poems, to which we have referred, and then try the “Ode to France,” “Youth and Age,” “Dejection,” “Love Poems,” “Fears in Solitude,” “Religious Musings,” “Work Without Hope,” and the glorious “Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni.”  One exquisite little poem from the Latin, “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn,” and his version of Schiller’s Wallenstein, show Coleridge’s remarkable power as a translator.  The latter is one of the best poetical translations in our literature.