of great interest, but the action does not sufficiently grow on the stage itself.  Perhaps, also, the purpose of Alvar to waken remorse in Ordonio’s mind is put forward too prominently, and has too much the look of a mere moral experiment to be probable under the circumstances in which the brothers stand to each other.  Nevertheless, there is a calmness as well as superiority of intellect in Alvar which seem to justify, in some measure, the sort of attempt on his part, which, in fact, constitutes the theme of the play; and it must be admitted that the whole underplot of Isidore and Alhadra is lively and affecting in the highest degree.  We particularly refer to the last scene between Ordonio and Isidore in the cavern, which we think genuine Shakespeare; and Alhadra’s narrative of her discovery of her husband’s murder is not surpassed in truth and force by anything of the kind that we know....

We have not yet referred to the “Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” the “Odes on France,” and the “Departing Year,” or the “Love Poems.”  All these are well known by those who know no other parts of Coleridge’s poetry, and the length of our preceding remarks compels us to be brief in our notice.  Mrs. Barbauld, meaning to be complimentary, told our poet, that she thought the “Ancient Mariner” very beautiful, but that it had the fault of containing no moral.  “Nay, madam,” replied the poet, “if I may be permitted to say so, the only fault in the poem is that there is too much In a work of such pure imagination I ought not to have stopped to give reasons for things, or inculcate humanity to beasts.  ‘The Arabian Nights’ might have taught me better.”  They might—­ the tale of the merchant’s son who puts out the eyes of a genii by flinging his date-shells down a well, and is therefore ordered to prepare for death—­might have taught this law of imagination; but the fault is small indeed; and the “Ancient Mariner” is, and will ever be, one of the most perfect pieces of imaginative poetry, not only in our language, but in the literature of all Europe.  We have, certainly, sometimes doubted whether the miraculous destruction of the vessel in the presence of the pilot and hermit, was not an error, in respect of its bringing the purely preternatural into too close contact with the actual frame-work of the poem.  The only link between those scenes of out-of-the-world wonders, and the wedding guest, should, we rather suspect, have been the blasted, unknown being himself who described them.  There should have been no other witnesses of the truth of any part of the tale, but the “Ancient Mariner” himself.  This is by the way:  but take the work altogether, there is nothing else like it; it is a poem by itself; between it and other compositions, in pari materia, there is a chasm which you cannot overpass; the sensitive reader feels himself insulated, and a sea of wonder and mystery flows round him as round the spell-stricken ship itself.  It was a sad mistake in the ablest artist—­