ABSTRACT
Henry Crabb Robinson on ‘Christabel’, which had been read to him—extract from his diary, 9 October 1811: ‘It has great beauties and interests more than any so small a fragment I ever met with, and that purely by the force of poetic painting…. The mystic sentimentality of Coleridge, however, adorned by original imagery, can never interest the gay or frivolous, who are to be attracted by the quick succession of commonplace and amusing objects; and for the same reason the deep glances into the innermost nature of man and the original views of the relations of things which Coleridge’s works are fraught with are a stumbling-block and an offence to the million, not a charm’ (On Books and Their Writers, i, 47–8).
