Around, around, flew each sweet sound, Slowly the sounds came back again, Sometimes a-dropping from the sky Sometimes all little birds that are, And now 'twas like all instruments, Now like a lonely flute; And now it is an angel's song, That makes the heavens be mute. It ceas'd; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon, A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Had the Rime stood alone it must have immortalized its writer; but the same year or two which produced it brought to light the earlier and more important portion of Christabel. That is a poem for poets. Yet The Ancient Mariner, which might have been supposed made to compel popular admiration, lay practically still-born until the twin inspiration, printed nineteen years later, called it into acknowledged life. The two resemble one another in nothing except loveliness. The variety which distinguishes Christabel has no affinity to that of its coeval in birth. Every diverse current in The Ancient Mariner sets towards one inevitable end. In Christabel there is no necessity to work in any given direction. Never had a rich and capricious fancy more liberty. Never did apparent trust in chance better justify its independence. Fancy rules; as irresponsible as the swaying of a leafy bough. The result is harmony, nevertheless; perfect in its thought, its images, its new and fascinating flexibility of rhythm. It might almost be thought that the poet was improvising, and as uncertain as his audience of each next musical effect till it came: It moan'd as near as near can be, Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. The night is chill; the forest bare ; Hush, beating heart of Christabel ! She folded her arms beneath her cloak, There she sees a damsel bright, That shadowy in the moonlight shone ; And again the wonderful, changeful melody: "In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, For this is alone in Thy power to declare, That in the dim forest Thou heard'st a low moaning, And found'st a bright lady surpassingly fair; And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity, Christabel and The Ancient Mariner have their several stations; fixed stars in the empyrean of letters. One is a masterpiece of art, which foils all attempts to detect the secret of its workmanship. The other is so entrancing in its unison of heart and brain, that its captives are never free to inquire whether there be a secret at all. If proof be still wanting of the perfection of Christabel, it is that true criticism has never regretted its incompleteness. Well that it remains a torso incomparable! I have classed with them three other poems; and they all deserve their eminence. First must stand the wondrous Vision-like Christabel, a fragment. Execrable, unpardonable, the business person from Porlock', who stifled two hundred or more golden dream-lines of Kubla-Khan! A great master of fiction, and a poet too, as we walked up the hill at the foot of which he dwells, once told me that he ranked Kubla-Khan highest among Coleridge's poems. It was a paradox, though so far literally true that the dreamer of such a dream is demonstrated thereby to have had poetry in his very blood! The melody bubbles, dances, revels, laments, and threatens : But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, By turns it falls, and, again, rises into an Abyssinian maid's song of Mount Abora, with palaces built of sunshine, over caverns of ice, and yielding delights ineffably seductive and perilous. A dizzy singing trance! Yet hardly less of common daylight texture than the exquisite Conversational Poem, with its rivalries of many nightingales amid tangled wild woods, interpreted in verse scarcely less honey-sweet than Lorenzo and Jessica's moonlit love ditty : Far and near, In wood and thicket, over the wide grove, And murmurs musical and swift jug jug, And one low piping sound more sweet than all— That should you close your eyes, you might almost Whose dewy leafits are but half-disclosed, You may perchance behold them on the twigs, Their bright, bright eyes, their eyes both bright and full, Lights up her love-torch. A most gentle maid, Who dwelleth in her hospitable home Hard by the castle, and knows all their notes, On blosmy twig still swinging from the breeze, Like tipsy joy that reels with tossing head." As worthy, still once more, of a place in the hierarchy of song, is the Introduction to the Ballad of The Dark Ladie. The ballad, like Christabel, is a fragment; but the prelude, on the variety of ministers that Love can enlist-even 'a soft and doleful air, an old and moving story'-is as complete in beauty and colour as a rose : All impulses of soul and sense Had thrill'd my guileless Genevieve; The rich and balmy eve; And hopes, and fears that kindle hope, An undistinguishable throng, And gentle wishes long subdued, Subdued and cherish'd long! She wept with pity and delight, She blush'd with love, and virgin shame ; And, like the murmur of a dream, I heard her breathe my name. |