If such a man fell asleep in his 'high lonely tower' his dreams would present to him in sensuous imagery the very world in which the strange history of the 'Ancient Mariner' was transacted. It is a world in which both animated things, and stones, and brooks, and clouds, and plants are moved by spiritual agency; in which, as he would put it, the veil of the senses is nothing but a symbolism everywhere telling of unseen and supernatural forces. What we call the solid and the substantial becomes a dream; and the dream is the true underlying reality. The difference between such poetry, and the poetry of Pope, or even of Gray, or Goldsmith, or Cowper—poetry which is the direct utterance of a string of moral, political, or religious reflections—implies a literary revolution. Coleridge, even more distinctly than Wordsworth, represented a deliberate rejection of the canons of the preceding school; for, if Wordsworth's philosophy differed from that of Pope, he still taught by direct exposition instead of the presentation of sensuous symbolism. The distinction might be illustrated by the ingenious criticism of Mrs. Barbauld, who told Coleridge that the 'Ancient Mariner' had two faults—it was improbable and had no moral. Coleridge owned the improbability, but replied to the other stricture that it had too much moral, for that it ought to have had no more than a story in the 'Arabian Nights.' Indeed, the moral, which would apparently be that people who sympathise with a man who shoots an albatross will die in prolonged torture of thirst, is open to obvious objections. Coleridge's poetical impulse died early; perhaps, as De Quincey said, it was killed by the opium; or as Coleridge said himself, that his afflictions had suspended what nature gave him at his birth, His shaping spirit of imagination. So that his only plan was From his own nature all the natural man, By abstruse research to steal, and partly, too, I should guess, for the reason that this strange mystic world in which he was at home was so remote from all ordinary experience that it failed even to provide an efficient symbolism for his deepest thoughts, and could only be accessible in the singular glow and fervour of youthful inspiration. The domestic anxieties, the pains of ill-health, the depression produced by opium, were a heavy clog upon an imagination which should try to soar into vast aerial regions. But it may be doubtful whether this peculiar vein of imagination, opened in the 'Ancient Mariner' and 'Christabel,' could in any case have been worked much further.