If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that at the time of the appearance of the _Ancient Mariner_ not even Wordsworth, not even Southey quite relished it, while there has always been a sect of dissidents against it), two others will perhaps seem more extravagant still. The second is that, with the exception of this poem, of _Kubla Khan_, of _Christabel_, and of _Love_, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few months of each other in 1797-98, he never did anything of the first class in poetry. The third is that these four--though _Christabel_ itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred lines and is decidedly unequal, though the _Ancient Mariner_ is just over six hundred and the other two are quite short--are sufficient between them to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets. It is not possible to make any compromise on this point; for upon it turns an entire theory and system of poetical criticism. Those who demand from poetry a "criticism of life," those who will have it that "all depends on the subject," those who want "moral" or "construction" or a dozen other things,--all good in their way, most of them compatible with poetry and even helpful to it, but none of them essential thereto,--can of course never accept this estimate. Mrs. Barbauld said that _The Ancient Mariner_ was "improbable"; and to this charge it must plead guilty at once. _Kubla Khan_, which I should rank as almost the best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a dream, and a fragment of a dream. _Love_ is very short too, and is flawed by some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the Lake school escaped when they tried passion. _Christabel_, the most ambitious if also the most unequal, does really underlie the criticism that, professing itself to be a narrative and holding out the promise of something like a connected story, it tells none, and does not even offer very distinct hints or suggestions or what its story, if it had ever been told, might have been. A thousand faults are in it; a good part of the thousand in all four. But there is also there something which would atone for faults ten thousand times ten thousand; there is what one hears at most three or four times in English, at most ten or twelve times in all literature--the first note, with its endless echo-promise, of a new poetry. The wonderful cadence-changes of _Kubla Khan_, its phrases, culminating in the famous distich so well descriptive of Coleridge himself-- For he on honey dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise, the splendid crash of the Ancestral voices prophesying war,