Nay, was not the mariner, too, a spectre?  Now he is gone, and what was all this that he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn.  Or did he tell me, or did I only dream it?  A light shadow cast by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone.  Did we see it, or imagine it?  Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem.  “Poetry,” says Coleridge, “gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.  It was so by me with Gray’s ‘Bard’ and Collins’ odes.  ’The Bard’ once intoxicated me, and now I read it without pleasure.” [19] There is no danger that his own poem will ever lose its attractiveness in this way.  Something inexplicable will remain to tease us, like the white Pater Noster and St. Peter’s sister in Chaucer’s night-spell.[20]

Pater subtly connects Coleridge’s poetic method with his philosophical idealism.  “The too palpable intruders from a spiritual world, in almost all ghost literature, in Scott and Shakespeare even, have a kind of coarseness or crudeness, . . .  ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ has the plausibility, the perfect adaptation to reason and life, which belongs to the marvellous, when actually presented as part of a credible experience in our dreams. . . .  The spectral object, so crude, so impossible, has become plausible, as ’the spot upon the brain that will show itself without,’ and is understood to be but a condition of one’s own mind, for which—­according to the scepticism latent at least in so much of our modern philosophy—­the so-called real things themselves are but spectra after all.  It is this finer, more delicately marvellous supernaturalism, the fruit of his more delicate psychology, which Coleridge infuses into romantic narrative, itself also then a new or revived thing in English literature; and with a fineness of weird effect in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ unknown in those old, more simple, romantic legends and ballads.  It is a flower of mediaeval, or later German romance, growing up in the peculiarly compounded atmosphere of modern psychological speculation, and putting forth in it wholly new qualities.”

In “The Ancient Mariner,” as in most purely romantic poetry, the appeal is more to the imagination than to the heart or the conscience.  Mrs. Barbauld complained that it was improbable and had no moral.  Coleridge admitted its improbability, but said that it had too much moral; that, artistically speaking, it should have had no more moral than a fairy tale.  The lesson of course is that of kindness to animals—­“He prayeth well who loveth well,” etc.  But the punishment of the mariner, and still more of the mariner’s messmates, is so out of proportion to the gravity of the offence as to be slightly ludicrous when stated by Leslie Stephen thus:  “People who approve of the unnecessary killing of an albatross will die a lingering death by starvation.”