It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, the almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one begins to sift and riddle the not small mass of his verse, it shrinks almost appallingly in bulk. _Wallenstein_, though better than the original, is after all only a translation. _Remorse_ (either under that name or as _Osorio_) and _Zapolya_ are not very much better than the contemporary or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. _The Fall of Robespierre_ is as absurd and not so amusing as Southey's unassisted _Wat Tyler_. Of the miscellaneous verse with which, after these huge deductions, we are left, much is verse-impromptu, often learned and often witty, for Coleridge was (in early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both wit and humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last lustrum of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) much is not very good. _Religious Musings_, though it has had its admirers, is terribly poor stuff. _The Monody on the Death of Chatterton_ might have been written by fifty people during the century before it. _The Destiny of Nations_ is a feeble rant; but the _Ode on the Departing Year_, though still unequal, still conventional, strikes a very different note. _The Three Graves_, though injured by the namby-pambiness which was still thought incumbent in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And then, omitting for the moment _Kubla Khan_, which Coleridge said he wrote in 1797, but of which no mortal ever heard till 1816, we come to _The Rime of the Ancient Mariner_ and the birth of the new poetry in England. Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech and steady blaze; here poetry, which for a century and a half had been curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to a forensic declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood-notes to escape here and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud and clear.