He had begun the _Ancient Mariner_ upon a previous walking-tour, also as a joint composition with the other poet, but had taken it into his own hands and finally completed it this spring. He had an immense proposal for an epic, which should take ten years for collecting material, five for writing and five for revising--nobody could accuse Coleridge of undue haste! He had undertaken a translation of Wieland's _Oberon_, which was likely to be more troublesome than remunerative. But most of all he desired to ascertain his friends' criticism on his newest fragment, _Christabel_: the bulk of his achievements were but fragmentary at the best. [Illustration: GERALDINE IN THE FOREST. "There she sees a damsel bright, Drest in a silken robe of white, That shadowy in the moonlight shone: The neck that made that white robe wan, Her stately neck, and arms were bare. * * * * * And wildly glittered here and there The gems entangled in her hair." (_Christabel_).] Coleridge's mind was that extremely _rara avis in terra_, which combines the artistic with the philosophic temperament--two inherently-opposed qualities. His acute and sensitive perceptions of sound, sight, colour and romantic possibility did not in the least satisfy his heavy logical demands. Of art for art's sake he had the poorest opinion. He was of dual nature,--and where the philosopher, the metaphysician and the divine preponderated in him, they completely over-weighted the exquisite, ethereal imagination, which was so infinitely more precious, had he known it. And although in this golden year of his life, this _annus mirabilis_ of his sojourn at Nether Stowey,--he was still allured to the marvellous, the strange and the supernatural, he sought to disguise his surrender to these phantasies, by clothing his desires in the garb of a severe philosophy of poetry. He decided, in concert with Wordsworth, that it would be well for him to undertake a series of poems in which, as he put it, "the incident and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural: and the excellence arrived 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." A cold and unproductive soil this, one would suppose, in which to grow the glowing flowers of _Christabel_, where night itself, peopled with occult alarms, cannot minimise the mingled horror and splendour of Geraldine's first appearance.