Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is an imaginative expression of that divine love which embraces all creatures, from the highest to the lowest, of the consequences of the severance of man’s soul from this animating principle of the universe, and of those spiritual threshings by and through which it is brought again under its blessed influence. In his ‘Cristabel’ he has exhibited the dark principle of evil, lurking within the good, and ever struggling with it. We read it in the spell the wicked witch Geraldine works upon her innocent and unsuspecting protector; we read it in the strange words which Geraldine addresses to the spirit of the saintly mother who has approached to shield from harm the beloved child for whom she died; we read it in the story of the friendship and enmity between the Baron and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine; we read it in the vision seen in the forest by the minstrel Bard, of the bright green snake coiled around the wings and neck of a fluttering dove; and, finally, we read it in its most startling form, in the conclusion of the poem, “A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself,” etc., wherein is exhibited the strange tendency to express love’s excess “with words of unmeant bitterness”. This dark principle of evil, we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet’s mind, in an abstract form, crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of its ugly presence. Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit. Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation, had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the ‘Prometheus Unbound’, which is, in the words of Todhunter, “to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny of the evil principle which at present rules over the world, typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting him with that poetic imagination which is the true prophetic power, penetrating the mystery of things, because, as Shelley implies, it is a kind of divine Logos incarnate in man--a creative force which dominates nature by acting in harmony with her.”