are all part of this note and cry. You will find them nowhere from Chaucer to Cowper--not even in the poets where you will find greater things as you may please to call them. Then in the _Mariner_ comes the gorgeous metre,--freed at once and for the first time from the "butter-woman's rank to market" which had distinguished all imitations of the ballad hitherto,--the more gorgeous imagery and pageantry here, the simple directness there, the tameless range of imagination and fancy, the fierce rush of rhythm:-- The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free: We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea. And thereafter the spectre of Life-in-Death, the water-snakes, the rising of the dead men, the snapping of the spell. There had been nothing like all this before; and in all the hundred years, for all the great poetry we have seen, we have seen nothing so _new_ as it. _Love_ gave the magnificent opening stanza, the motto and defence at once of the largest, the most genuine, the most delightful part of poetry. And _Christabel_, independently of its purple patches, such as the famous descant on the quarrels of friends, and the portents that mark the passage of Geraldine, gave what was far more important--a new metre, destined to have no less great and much more copious influence than the Spenserian stanza itself. It might of course be easy to pick out anticipations in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic, and anapaestic; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how it seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown by the well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little of it recited, at once developed it and established it in _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_. In verse at least, if not in prose, there is no greater _master_ than Coleridge.