they agreed to defray the expenses of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to The Monthly Magazine. Accordingly, in the course of their walk, they planned the poem of the 'Ancient Mariner,' founded on a dream of a friend of Coleridge, the Mr. Cruikshank, who was his neighbor at Stowey. Much the greater part of the story was Coleridge's invention, but certain parts Wordsworth invented. 'For example,' says Wordsworth, 'some crime to be committed which would bring upon the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the spectral persecution as a consequence of that crime and his own wanderings.

"I had been reading,' he continues, in Shelvocke's Voyages, a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the longest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. "Suppose," said I, "you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of those regions take upon them to avenge the crime?" The incident was thought fit for the purpose and adopted accordingly.'" The poets began the composition on that evening; but their respective methods proved so widely different that Wordsworth withdrew from the undertaking.

Coleridge's account of the same occurrence, in the fourteenth chapter of his "Biographia Literaria," is less prosaic and more suggestive.

He writes: "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbors, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power

of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colors of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of

nature.

"The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.

"For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from actual life; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. . . My endeavors should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer, from our inward nature, a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. this view I wrote the Ancient Mariner.””

With

The circumstances attending the composition of another of Coleridge's poems, "Kubla Khan," reveal another phase of the working of his mind. Speaking of himself as a third person, the poet writes: "In the summer of the year 1797, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Lynton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair, at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same susbtance in Purchas''Pilgrimage': 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto; and thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.'

"The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines, if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.

"On awaking, he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out, and on his return found that all the rest had passed away, like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast."

Only fifty-four lines were preserved; the author, with

his customary irresolution, not being able to apply him. self to the completion of the poem, while the still dimly surviving recollections were in his mind.

These examples of an author's conception and origination of his writings, though inadequate to reveal much of the inner movements of his genius, at least may tell us something of the influence under which he writes. Let no one think, however, that even could the "divine afflatus of the poet's mind be laid bare, the art of poetic composition can be won by diligent imitation or painstaking study. Poetry may prove a source of exalted and exquisite pleasure to the student; but only the poet born can hope to drink from the fountain of Castalia or to climb Parnassus, in order to give to the world the "rich enchantments and richer humanities," such as Coleridge has poured upon us,-in no poem more abundantly than in his profound, mysterious, and splendid "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit, et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera ? Quid agunt? quæ loca habitant? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabula, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari: ne mens assuefacta hodiernæ vitæ minutiis se contrabat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.

-T. Burnet, Archæol. Phil., p. 68.