“God himself
  Scarce seemed there to be,”

welcome the firm earth beneath our feet, and the homely sound of the vesper bell.  In Christabel we float dreamily through scenes as unearthly and ephemeral as the misty moonlight, and the words in which Coleridge conjures up his vision fall into music of magic beauty.  The opening of the poem creates a sense of foreboding, and the horror of the serpent-maiden is subtly suggested through her effect on Christabel.  Coleridge hints at the terrible with artistic reticence.  In Kubla Khan the chasm is: 

  “A savage place! as holy and enchanted
  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
  By woman wailing for her demon-lover.”

The poetry of Keats is often mysterious and suggestive of terror.  The description of the Gothic hall in The Eve of St. Agnes: 

  “In all the house was heard no human sound;
  A chain-drooped lamp was flickering by each door;
  The arras, rich with horseman, hawk and hound,
  Fluttered in the besieging wind’s uproar;
  And the long carpets rose along the gusty floor;”

the serpent-maiden, Lamia, who

  “Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
  Some demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self;”

the grim story in Isabella of Lorenzo’s ghost, who

  “Moaned a ghostly undersong
  Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along.”

all lead us over the borderland.  In a rejected stanza of the Ode on Melancholy, he abandons the horrible: 

  “Though you should build a bark of dead men’s bones
  And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
  Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
  To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
  Although your rudder be a dragon’s tail
  Long severed, yet still hard with agony,
  Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull
  Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
  To find the Melancholy—­”

Keats’s melancholy is not to be found amid images of horror: 

  “She dwells with Beauty—­Beauty that must die,
  And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
  Bidding adieu.”

In La Belle Dame sans Merci he conveys with delicate touch the memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely loitering.  We see it through his eyes: 

  “I saw pale kings and princes too,
  Pale warriors, death-pale were they all: 
  They cried—­’La Belle Dame sans Merci
  Hath thee in thrall!’

  “I saw their starv’d lips in the gloam
  With horrid warning gaped wide,
  And I awoke and found me here,
  On the cold hill’s side.”