“By him who died on cross”: 

  “Heaven’s mother send us grace”: 

  “The very deep did rot.  O Christ
    That ever this should be!”

The albatross is hung about the mariner’s neck instead of the crucifix, and drops off only when he blesses the creatures of the calm and is able to pray.  The sleep which refreshes him is sent by “Mary Queen” from heaven.  The cross-bow with which he shoots the bird is a mediaeval property.  The loud bassoon and the bride’s garden bower and the procession of merry minstrels who go nodding their heads before her are straight out of the old land of balladry.  One cannot fancy the wedding guest dressed otherwise than in doublet and hose, and perhaps wearing those marvellous pointed shoes and hanging sleeves which are shown in miniature paintings of the fifteenth century.  And it is thus that illustrators of the poem have depicted him.  Place is equally indefinite with time.  What port the ill-fated ship cleared from we do not know or seek to know; only the use of the word kirk implies that it was somewhere in “the north countree”—­the proper home of ballad poetry.

Coleridge’s romances were very differently conceived from Scott’s.  He wove them out of “such stuff as dreams are made on.”  Industrious commentators have indeed traced features of “The Ancient Mariner” to various sources.  Coleridge’s friend, Mr. Cruikshank. had a dream of a skeleton ship.  Wordsworth told him the incident, which he read in Shelvocke’s voyages, of a certain Captain Simon Hatley who shot a black albatross south of Terra del Fuego, in hopes that its death might bring fair weather.  Brandl thinks that the wedding banquet in Monk Lewis’ “Alonzo the Brave and the Fair Imogene,” furnished a hint; and surmises—­what seems unlikely—­that Coleridge had read a certain epistle by Paulinus, a bishop of the fourth century, describing a vessel which came ashore on the coast of Lucania with only one sailor on board, who reported that the ship had been deserted, as a wreck, by the rest of the crew, and had since been navigated by spirits.

But all this is nothing and less than nothing.  “The Ancient Mariner” is the baseless fabric of a vision.  We are put under a spell, like the wedding guest, and carried off to the isolation and remoteness of mid-ocean.  Through the chinks of the narrative, the wedding music sounds unreal and far on.  What may not happen to a man alone on a wide, wide sea?  The line between earthly and unearthly vanishes.  Did the mariner really see the spectral bark and hear spirits talking, or was it all but the phantasmagoria of the calenture, the fever which attacks the sailor on the tropic main, so that he seems to see green meadows and water brooks on the level brine?  No one can tell; for he is himself the only witness, and the ship is sunk at the harbour mouth.  One conjectures that no wreckers or divers will ever bring it to the top again.