"
"She was most beautiful to see,
Like a lady of a far countree."
Who was she? What did she want? Whence did she come? What was the
horror she revealed to the night in the bower of Christabel?
"Then drawing in her breath aloud
Like one that shuddered, she unbound
The cincture from beneath her breast.
Her silken robe and inner vest
Dropt to her feet, and full in view
Behold her bosom and half her side--
A sight to dream of, not to tell!
O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!"
And then what do her words mean?
"Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow."
What was it--the "sight to dream of, not to tell?"
Coleridge never did tell, and, though he and Mr. Gilman said he knew,
Wordsworth thought he did not know. He raised a spirit that he had not
the spell to lay. In the Paradise of Poets has he discovered the secret?
We only know that the mischief, whatever it may have been, was wrought.
"O sorrow and shame! Can this be she--
The lady who knelt at the old oak tree?"
. . .
"A star hath set, a star hath risen,
O Geraldine, since arms of thine
Have been the lovely lady's prison.
O Geraldine, one hour was thine." {11}
If Coleridge knew, why did he never tell? And yet he maintains that "in
the very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my
mind, with the wholeness no less than with the liveliness of a vision,"
and he expected to finish the three remaining parts within the year.
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