ILLUSTRATIONS TO THE ANCIENT MARINER.

gypsy freedom of manner and of thought, that mocks the canons of art, snaps its fingers at the conventions, and dances gayly on its way, in a world of its own, to a tune of its own piping. The Scotchman, on the contrary, reverences the conventions without in any sense being their slave. He laid the foundations of his art in the scholastic servitude the other scorned, and held honestly to the high ideal he created, while the other sacrificed whatever ideal he may have had to the one consuming passion of novelty; for creating and producing, assailing new projects, and penetrating into fresh fields before the present ones were gleaned. With Paton, nothing is done unless it is well done; with Doré everything is done that conveys the idea, irrespective of the technical polish or perfection in which the idea finds expression. The one produces pictures, rich with the fruits of ripe knowledge and profound thought; the other sketches, in whose daring conception and bold treatment our eyes forget their intrinsic weakness. It would astonish and shock us as much to discover academic correctness in Doré, as to encounter impressionistic weakness or reckless negligence in Paton.

Yet these strongly contrasted genuises have come together on a common ground, and handin-hand with a third genius as remarkable as themselves, and as antithetical to them as they are to each other, form the most notable triumvirate the artistic growth of the time has produced. THE ANCIENT MARINER, as portrayed by Coleridge, and put in tangible pictorial form by Doré and Paton, is beyond all comparison unique. The art by which the poem is illustrated is like the poem itself, of dual quality. In the more picturesque and imaginative passages we recognize the sympathy which drew Doré to the work; in the subtler allegories of the Rime, we detect the inspiration at which Paton grasped. The changing mental conditions of the poet, which his work mirrors, are reflected by each artist according to his own mental affiliations, and each man's work is perfect in itself from the standpoint its creator's tastes assigned him to.

The Paton illustrations to THE ANCIENT MARINER were executed in a competition instituted by the London Art Union a quarter of a century ago. They were chosen for publication as a premium by the Art Union, from among a dozen competitors, and had much to do with the artist's appointment as Queen's Limner for Scotland, a titulary honor held in high esteem in Caledonia, and with his knighthood, which was conferred upon him the year following the publication of his masterly plates. The appearance of the Ancient Mariner secured a triumph to the artist he had been far from anticipating. Considerable as had been the recognition he had previously encountered, this work doubled his fame; yet it was virtually a private publication, for it was printed for distribution among members of the Art Union only, was never put on sale, and is consequently a precious rarity in the collection of the bibliophiles.

The use of the outline in it is a consequence of the revival in England of the Greek feeling and method in design, which found such eloquent expression at the hands of Flaxman. But the art of Paton declined complete subserviency to classical rules, and he grafted on the manner of his predecessors the tendency to the romantic which is a striking characteristic of all of his productions.

The designs are classical in their simplicity and purity of conception, and romantic in the respect shown to those pictorial details which the complete classicist disdains. In this combination of qualities, blended as they are into perfect harmony, his Ancient Mariner stands alone. The only approach that modern art has made to it is to be found in the spirited and pictorial, but far feebler plates which at about the same time, in this country, won such renown for our own Darley-his outlines to Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and his series of illustrations to Judd's Margaret.

It was the ballad spirit, itself contemptuous of fixed rules, the weird and daring inventive flignts of Coleridge's master work, that some ten years later led the pencil of Doré to the same task that Paton had essayed so successfully. The wonderful Frenchman had already illustrated The Wandering Jew, with wide fame to himself. In this poem he saw a grander opportunity, and brought to its development all the forces of his eccentric and untrammeled genius. The crowning of his efforts was worthy of them. THE ANCIENT MARINER was immediately accepted as his greatest work in the line of imaginative design.

In contra-distinction to Paton, whose adherence to his text was absolute, Doré in his plates exercised the largest liberty of translating the text according to his own fancy. He cast both realism and classicism entirely aside, and produced a series of pictures which are not to be analyzed or criticised, but to be wondered at and admired. There is more of the poet in them than in anything else he has done. In their strangely fanciful beauty, and wondrously weird horror and despair, they bring the man who made them very vividly home to us; and if they had been his only work in life would provide him with a splendid monument. They are marred by less of the hastiness and mannerism that his incessantly active genius imposed on its productions, and exhibit him with fewer imperfections, as an artist and a poet of the first order, whose very weaknesses are the off springs of his strength.

NEW YORK, October, 1886.

ALFRED TRUMBLE.

THE BIRTH OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

N the year 1797, while the frost was still in the ground, there came to live in a humble cottage at Nether Stowey, on the Somersetshire coast, a man with lank black hair and sea-green eyes, deep set under a forehead of ivory. He was a young man, with a consciousness of power about him that gave him the dignity of double his twenty-five years. He was already a man of family, and poor. He possessed a gift of language, and an eloquence of commonplace expression that stunned the simple villagers, and aided his eccentric manners in rendering him a man of mark in the little community in which chance had cast his lot for him; for chance had more to do with deciding and undeciding the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge than any volition of his own.

Set in a cup of the downs, where the verdure preserved a perennial freshness in the keen kiss of the sea breeze, Nether Stowey was the place of places for a wild songbird to make its nest. There was a stimulus as of sparkling wine in the wave-born winds that fanned the grasses on its tumbled hills, and chanted among its tangled coppices; there was the inspiration of perpetual music in the solemn sweep of the surges that broke upon its shore; in the sunlight that splashed the sea with spangles of light, and painted the greensward with shadow pictures from the flying clouds, the soul of the poet rose, like the lark from its dew-dripping covert, and soared, singing glorious and triumphant in its freedom and its power, into the zenith of immortality.

The good people of Nether Stowey beheld their neighbor coursing over the downs, bursting through the copsewoods, plunging like a diver among the thicketed billows of the rolling hills, and wandering, often with the uncertain and irresolute step of a blind man, along its beaten paths, declaiming like a madman, in fragmentary eloquence, and chanting snatches of broken rhyme in a weird and peculiar recitative that was neither speech nor song. He was most animated and fluent when the ground was rough and broken, and the obstacles in the way had to be burst through with the headlong and reckless energy of a hunted stag; most tender and melodious when he went loosely over the level, shifting from one side of the path to the other, with his pale front ploughing the air, and his eyes burning darkly in the murky shadows of his overhanging brows. They may well have set him down for a madman when these wild moods were on him; indeed, there was a touch of madness in his blood, for the fuel that fed the fire in the sea-green eyes had already commenced to scorch his will, and torment the genius it eventually sported with and destroyed.

There was one figure of the seaboard settlements of England in those days that became very familiar to Coleridge in his wanderings. The race of sea-dogs that had held the Frenchman by the throat, had hunted the Spaniard to his lair, and served the smoking guns in the American war, had left its veterans stranded in every village of the coast. Bristol, near at hand to Nether Stowey, was a great West India port, and all along the Bristol Channel the smuggler found snug harbor between his adventurous rovings. His dark face scowled upon the poet as his vagrant steps led

him past the retreats that lawlessness had found for itself, among the brown heaths that overlooked the shore; and the wind-warped and weather-hardened devastators of the deep, who had swept the Western ocean and the Southern sea on wings of fire, and hunted their quarry in the sunsmitten fastnesses of the Spanish Main, were frequent companions of his strolls. Strong and fearless men were they, even with the weight of years bowing them grave-wards; rude men, of wild lives studded with dark deeds and savage memories; rovers who had drifted on the great waters, with red hands that had left their bloody seal in every clime, and came at last to anchor in the quiet harbors of their native coast, to live again in memory the past that they had rendered at once glorious and terrible. There was the suggestion for a romance in every one of their harsh and desperate lives, that a far feebler appreciation than Coleridge's could not but have discovered; to his active mind and vivid imagination, these ancient mariners were poetic potentialities, that soon crystalized themselves into the absorbing inspiration for his greatest work.

Among the poet's neighbors and companions was his brother genius, Wordsworth. They had met not long before, and formed an immediate friendship, whose ties were so strong that they drew Wordsworth from Dorsetshire, when Coleridge settled at Nether Stowey, and landed him at Alfoxden, three miles away, to keep them near together. They conceived a plan for the joint production of a volume of Lyrical Ballads, in the hope to revive the popular taste for romantic poetry in its highest form; and one day when Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother were sharing his tramp along the Channel hil.s, Coleridge confided to them his scheme for the poem of The Ancient Mariner. The plot was still vague and unformed in his mind; it had come to him in one of his opiuminspired dreams, growing out of the impression made upon him by his marine surroundings, and it was yet only one of those poetic phantoms of which he conjured up so many and materialized so few. The Wordsworths felt the value of the splendid germ, and the trio discussed and debated it. Wordsworth himself made some suggestions, and he and Coleridge began the work in common; but as Wordsworth admits in his story of his life, the inharmoniousness of their styles struck him at the outset and Coleridge was left to carry out his labor alone.

It has been said with truth, that Coleridge's two years at Nether Stowey were the most splendidly productive of his life. He was still to a great extent master of his will, and capable of mental concentration and consecutive and prolonged production, that a few years later became impossible to him. He assaulted The Ancient Mariner with the fever of a sculptor, hewing the offspring of his genius from the rock with the hand of inspiration. The splendid lyric rolled forth from him in billows of eloquence, blazing, like the waves of the seas its hero traversed on his mystic journey, with organic fire. He lived at bed and board with a gaunt and spectral guest, and went sailing through dreamland with his familiar, upon a nightly voyage of mystery and dread. It is not difficult to trace in it the influence of the artificial stimulant he had commenced to spur his imagination with, but this influence, being in its newness, before the reaction of the habit produced exhaustion and despair, is rather for the good, for it lights the poem with a weird and supernatural splendor, like the palpitating glories of the Northern Lights that flash upon its pages.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was cast in the shape of the old ballads, which had instigated the idea of the collection for which it was intended. The versification was irregular, but the poetic imagery and the splendor of diction; the passages of strong and vivid description; the touches of pathos, and the elements of preternatural mystery which enriched it, were such as ballad poetry had never known. The strained and unnatural action of the story was lost in the wild witchery of imagination which embroidered it. It aroused in the sensitive and sympathetic reader the fever of rapt wonder and the thrill of dread, and smote upon the mind of the least impression

THE BIRTH OF THE ANCIENT MARINER.

able with the firm, echoing melody of a trumpet blast. Like the story told the rapt wedding-guest by the grisly wanderer, this recapitulation of it took the reader up and away from himself, and bore him far abroad up its journey of horror and mystery, to its end of despair, repentance and redemption.

The effect of the poem on all to whom the secret of its progress was confided was instantaneous. Wordsworth was a mine of sympathy and in advice a tower of strength and the work completed itself in such form as caused Charles Lamb to write "I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading it I was totally possessed with it for many days;" and drew from Talfourd the eulogium: "The Ancient Mariner, one of his earliest works, is still his finest poem. At once the most vigorous in design and the most chaste in exccution-developing the intensest human affection, amidst the wildest scenery of a poet's dream." Allan Cunningham declared that in it he "sailed to the very limits of invention and belief," and if critical approbation could have guaranteed its success, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner alone would have secured a triumph for the Lyrical Ballads. But the Ballads, published by Cottle, at Bristol, in 1798, fell dead from the press, and Coleridge went off to Germany to study metaphysics leaving, the ghost of The Ancient Mariner to haunt the bookseller's neglected shelves.

The justice of time, however, exhumed it from the dust and polished it into the most resplendent jewel in his poetic crown. In 1800 appeared a second and enlarged edition of the Lyrical Ballads, rendered additionally valuable by an introduction in which Wordsworth explained his theories and principles of poetry. This time the public proved responsive, and The Ancient Mariner set forth upon a voyage that will not terminate till English literature comes to an end.

There were two further editions of the Lyrical Ballads, and in 1817 Coleridge published The Ancient Mariner in his collection of Sibylline Leaves. Certain omissions, alterations and additions were made in the poem for each of these editions, of which, in a desire to render the present edition as complete as possible, due notice has been taken. There will be found a number of the passages, afterwards omitted, restored in brackets to their original places in the text. Lines which have been altered are given in the text, with the earlier reading in a foot-note. The experiment will undoubtedly, find adverse critics, but having witnessed the birth of The Ancient Mariner it cannot but be of interest to the reader to trace his development also. The process of refining and per fecting a great poem is progressive, and reflecting as it does the poet's own progression and refinement, it must, naturally, have a value in our estimation of himself, as well as of the work with which he is as one.

NEW YORK, September, 1886.

ALFRED TRUMBLE.