ABSTRACT
The world was simply not yet worthy of it; and it is still one of the great miracles of poetic history that Coleridge himself should have produced it and its companions. Coleridge, in the "Ancient Mariner" and "Christabel", and "Kubla Khan"—under the influence of Sara, and Dorothy, and Hartley, and Wordsworth himself for persons. The extraordinary ignorance of the wealth of English vocabulary which prevailed could not be better shown than by the fact of a man like Wrangham pronouncing "swound" and "weft" to be "nonsensical". Coleridge not merely adopted, as he did in "Christabel", the full principle of anapaestic substitution in the individual line, but he used to the fullest extent the licence of extending the stanza to five or six lines. Mrs. Barbauld, nothing of a fool and something of a poetess, thought the Mariner "improbable", and told Coleridge so; to which he very properly replied that it certainly was.
