the principal person has not distinct character

I am sorry that Coleridge has christened his Ancient Mariner "a Poet's Reverie" - it is as bad as Bottom the Weaver's declaration that he is not a lion but only the scenical representation of a lion. What new idea is gained by this title, but one subversive of all credit, which the tale should force upon us, of its truth? For me, I was never so affected with any human tale. After first reading it, I was totally possessed with it for many days-I dislike all the miraculous part of it, but the feelings of the man under the operation of such scenery dragged me along like Tom Piper's magic whistle. I totally differ from your idea that the Mariner should have had a character and profession. This is a beauty in Gulliver's Travels, where the mind is kept in a placid state of little wonderments; but the Ancient Mariner undergoes such trials as overwhelm and bury all individuality or memory of what he was, like the state of a man in a bad dream, one terrible peculiarity of which is that all consciousness of personality is gone. Your other observation is, I think, as well a little unfounded: the Mariner from being conversant in supernatural events has acquired a supernatural and strange cast of phrase, eye, appearance, etc., which frighten the wedding guest. You will excuse my remarks, because I am hurt and vexed that you should think it necessary with a prose apology to open the eyes of dead men that cannot see. To sum up a general opinion of the second vol.-I do not feel any one poem in it so forcibly as The Ancient Mariner , The Mad Mother, and the Lines at Tintern Abbey, in the first.-I could, too, have wished the critical preface had appeared in a separate treatise. All its dogmas are true and just, and most of them new, as criticism. But they associate a diminishing idea with the poems which follow, as having been written for experiment on the public taste, more than having sprung (as they must have done) from living and daily circumstances.

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