The moral, as might be guessed, was foisted upon the poem by Wordsworth, and is identical with that of “Hart-Leap Well.”  Wordsworth and Coleridge started to write “The Ancient Mariner” jointly; and two or three lines in the poem, as it stands, were contributed by Wordsworth.  But he wanted to give the mariner himself “character and profession”; and to have the dead seamen come to life and sail the ship into port; and in other ways laid so heavy a hand upon Coleridge’s airy creation that it became plain that a partnership on these terms was out of the question, and Wordsworth withdrew altogether.  If we must look for spiritual sustenence in the poem, we shall find it perhaps not so much in any definite warning against cruelty to creatures, as in the sentiment of the blessedness of human companionship and the omnipresence of God’s mercy; in the passage, e.g.,

  “O wedding guest! this soul hath been
  Alone on a wide, wide sea,” etc.—­

where the thought is the same as in Cowper’s “Soliloquy of Alexander Selkirk,” even to the detail of the “church-going bell.”

The first part of “Christabel” was written in 1797; the second in 1800; and the poem, in its unfinished state, was given to the press in 1816.  Meanwhile it had become widely known in manuscript.  Coleridge used to read it to literary circles, and copies of it had got about.  We have seen its influence upon Scott.  Byron too admired it greatly, and it was by his persuasion that Coleridge finally published it as a fragment, finding himself unable to complete it, and feeling doubtless that the public regarded him much as the urchins in Keats’ poem regarded the crone

  “Who keepeth close a wondrous riddle book,
  As spectacled she sits in chimney nook.”

“Christabel” is more distinctly mediaeval than “The Ancient Mariner,” and is full of Gothic elements:  a moated castle, with its tourney court and its great gate

          . . . “ironed within and without,
  Where an army in battle array had marched out”: 

a feudal baron with a retinue of harpers, heralds, and pages; a lady who steals out at midnight into the moon-lit oak wood, to pray for her betrothed knight; a sorceress who pretends to have been carried off on a white palfrey by five armed men, and who puts a spelt upon the maiden.

If “The Ancient Mariner” is a ballad, “Christabel” is, in form, a roman d’aventures, or metrical chivalry tale, written in variations of the octosyllabic couplet.  These variations, Coleridge said, were not introduced wantonly but “in correspondence with some transition, in the nature of the imagery or passion.”  A single passage will illustrate this: 

  “They passed the hall that echoes still,
  Pass as lightly as you will. 
  The brands were flat, the brands were dying
  Amid their own white ashes lying;
  But when the lady passed, there came
  A tongue of light, a fit of flame;
  And Christabel saw the lady’s eye,
  And nothing else saw she thereby,
  Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall,
  Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. 
  O softly tread, said Christabel,
  My father seldom sleepeth well.”