In that weird ballad, the Ancient Mariner, the supernatural is handled with even greater subtlety than in Christabel.  The reader is led to feel that amid the loneliness of the tropic-sea the line between the earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and the poet leaves him to discover for himself whether the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were merely the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of the world of spirits.  Coleridge is one of our most perfect metrists.  The poet Swinburne—­than whom there can be no higher authority on this point (though he is rather given to exaggeration)—­pronounces Kubla Khan, “for absolute melody and splendor, the first poem in the language.”

Robert Southey, the third member of this group, was a diligent worker, and one of the most voluminous of English writers.  As a poet, he was lacking in inspiration, and his big oriental epics, Thalaba, 1801, and the Curse of Kehama, 1810, are little better than wax-work.  Of his numerous works in prose, the Life of Nelson is, perhaps, the best, and is an excellent biography.

Several other authors were more or less closely associated with the Lake Poets by residence or social affiliation.  John Wilson, the editor of Blackwood’s, lived for some time, when a young man, at Elleray, on the banks of Windermere.  He was an athletic man of outdoor habits, an enthusiastic sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery.  His admiration of Wordsworth was thought to have led him to imitation of the latter, in his Isle of Palms, 1812, and his other poetry.

One of Wilson’s companions, in his mountain walks, was Thomas De Quincey, who had been led by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where he occupied for many years the cottage from which Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank.  De Quincey was a shy, bookish man, of erratic, nocturnal habits, who impresses one, personally, as a child of genius, with a child’s helplessness and a child’s sharp observation.  He was, above all things, a magazinist.  All his writings, with one exception, appeared first in the shape of contributions to periodicals; and his essays, literary criticisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly rich and varied.  The most famous of them was his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, published as a serial in the London Magazine, in 1821.  He had begun to take opium, as a cure for the toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he resided from 1803 to 1808.  By 1816 he had risen to eight thousand drops of laudanum a day.  For several years after this he experienced the acutest misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis.  In 1821 he succeeded in reducing his dose to a comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off his torpor so as to become capable of literary work.  The most impressive effect of the opium habit was seen in his dreams, in the unnatural expansion of space and time,