The second part of the poem was less successful, partly for the reason, as the reviewers pointed out, that it undertakes the hardest of tasks, “witchery by daylight.”  But there were other reasons.  Three years had passed since the poem was begun.  Coleridge had been to Germany and had settled at Keswick.  The poet had been lost in the metaphysician, and he took up his interrupted task without inspiration, putting force upon himself.  The signs of effort are everywhere visible, and it is painfully manifest that the poet cannot recover the genial, creative mood in which he had set out.  In particular it is observable that, while there is no mention of place in the first part, now we have frequent references to Windermere, Borrowdale, Dungeon Ghyll, and other Lake Country localities familiar enough in Wordsworth’s poetry, but strangely out of place in “Christabel.”  It was certainly an artistic mistake to transfer Sir Leoline’s castle from fairyland to Cumberland.[24] There is one noble passage in the second part, the one which Byron prefixed to his “Farewell” to Lady Byron: 

  “Alas! they had been friends in youth,” etc.

But the stress of personal emotion in these lines is not in harmony with the romantic context.  They are like a patch of cloth of gold let into a lace garment and straining the delicate tissue till it tears.

The example of “The Ancient Mariner,” and in a still greater degree of “Christabel,” was potent upon all subsequent romantic poetry.  It is seen in Scott, in Byron, and in Keats, not only in the modelling of their tales, but in single lines and images.  In the first stanza of the “Lay” Scott repeats the line which occurs so often in “Christabel”—­“Jesu Maria shield her well!” In the same poem, the passage where the Lady Margaret steals out of Branksome Tower at dawn to meet her lover in the wood, gliding down the secret stair and passing the bloodhound at the portal, will remind all readers of “Christabel.”  The dialogue between the river and mountain spirits will perhaps remind them of the ghostly antiphonies which the “Mariner” hears in his trance.  The couplet

  “The seething pitch and molten lead
  Reeked like a witch’s caldron red.”

is, of course, from Coleridge’s

  “The water, like a witch’s oils,
  Burned green and blue and white.”

In “The Lord of the Isles” Scott describes the “elvish lustre” and “livid flakes” of the phosphorescence of the sea, and cites, in a note, the description, in “The Ancient Mariner,” of the sea snakes from which

  “The elvish light
  Fell off in hoary flakes.”

The most direct descendant of “Christabel” was “The Eve of St. Agnes.”  Madeline’s chamber, “hushed, silken, chaste,” recalls inevitably the passage in the older poem: 

  “The moon shines dim in the open air,
  And not a moonbeam enters here. 
  But they without its light can see
  The chamber carved so curiously,
  Carved with figures strange and sweet,
  All made out of the carver’s brain,
  For a lady’s chamber meet: 
  The lamp with twofold silver chain
  Is fastened to an angel’s feet.”