Roy Basler, in his _Sex, Symbolism and Psychology in Literature_, devotes a long chapter[41] to the poem which is recommended to the reader for its minute analysis of Coleridge’s skill in handling the whole episode. As he points out, it is “too realistic psychologically ... for one to avoid an erotic implication.” The remainder of the poem contains nothing further of variant significance. The spell of Geraldine’s touch has made it impossible for Christabel to give her father anything beyond the simplest objective account of how the woman came there, and the action merely prepares for later events never written. Of the content of these three projected “books” we have only a brief account by Dr. James Gilman, with whom Coleridge lived later while undergoing treatment for his addiction to opium. The relevant points follow: Complications force Geraldine to abandon her feminine form and to assume that of Christabel’s absent lover. In this guise she woos the girl and gains the father’s consent to a marriage, even though Christabel is filled with inexplicable loathing for her at the altar. Had Coleridge carried through this outlined narrative, he could scarcely, as Basler says, “have avoided even more harrowing suggestions of a sexual nature” in Geraldine’s disguised courtship. Significant of her sexual duality are repeated references to her height and her arrogant bearing. Basler points out that after 1801, Coleridge’s moral reputation was precarious because of his opium habit, and that “no man ever feared calumny more keenly.” Although the poet began _Christabel_ and had the entire plot worked out at that time, he published none of it for fifteen years. When it finally appeared, the _Edinburgh Review_ attacked it with “charges of obscenity” and “implications of personal turpitude,” while “parodies and vulgar continuations of the poem made the most of leering improbabilities.” The dread of further personal attack discouraged Coleridge from completing the work, and no other English poet seems to have approached the subject of variance for nearly a half century.