"The night is chill; the forest bare;
Is it the wind that moaneth bleak?
There is not wind enough in the air
To move away the ringlet curl
From the lovely lady's cheek—
There is not wind enough to twirl
The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky."
" ... What sees she there?
There she sees a damsel bright,
Drest in a silken robe of white."
Byron (vide ante, [p. 443]), in a letter to Coleridge, dated October 27, 1815, had already expressly guarded himself against a charge of plagiarism, by explaining that lines 521-532 of stanza xix. were written before he heard Walter Scott repeat Christabel in the preceding June. Now, as Byron himself perceived, perhaps for the first time, when he had the MS. of Christabel before him, the coincidence in language and style between the two passages is unquestionable; and, as he hoped and expected that Coleridge's fragment, when completed, would issue from the press, he was anxious to avoid even the semblance of pilfering, and went so far as to suggest that the passage should be cancelled. Neither in the private letter nor the published note does Byron attempt to deny or explain away the coincidence, but pleads that his lines were written before he had heard Coleridge's poem recited, and that he had not been guilty of a "wilful plagiarism." There is no difficulty in accepting his statement. Long before the summer of 1815 Christabel "had a pretty general circulation in the literary world" (Medwin, Conversations, 1824, p. 261), and he may have heard without heeding this and other passages quoted by privileged readers; or, though never a line of Christabel had sounded in his ears, he may (as Kölbing points out) have caught its lilt at second hand from the published works of Southey, or of Scott himself.
Compare Thalaba the Destroyer, v. 20 (1838, iv. 187)—
"What sound is borne on the wind?
Is it the storm that shakes
The thousand oaks of the forest?
Or compare The Lay of the Last Minstrel, I. xii. 5. seq. (1812, p. 24)—
"And now she sits in secret bower
In old Lord David's western tower,
And listens to a heavy sound,
That moans the mossy turrets round.
Is it the roar of Teviot's tide,
That chafes against the scaur's red side?
Is it the wind that swings the oaks?
Is it the echo from the rocks?" etc.
Certain lines of Coleridge's did, no doubt, "find themselves" in the Siege of Corinth, having found their way to the younger poet's ear and fancy before the Lady of the vision was directly and formally introduced to his notice.]
[pt] {473}There sate a lady young and bright.—[MS. G. erased.]
[366] [Contemporary critics fell foul of these lines for various reasons. The Critical Review (February, 1816, vol. iii. p. 151) remarks that "the following couplet [i.e. lines 531, 532] reminds us of the persiflage of Lewis or the pathos of a vulgar ballad;" while the Dublin Examiner (May, 1816, vol. i. p. 19) directs a double charge against the founders of the schism and their proselyte: "If the Cumberland Lakers were not well known to be personages of the most pious and saintly temperament, we would really have serious apprehensions lest our noble Poet should come to any harm in consequence of the envy which the two following lines and a great many others through the poems, might excite by their successful rivalship of some of the finest effects of babyism that these Gentlemen can boast.">[