which he cut out of “The Ancient Mariner.” He cut out of “This Lime-tree Bower my Prison,” a phrase informing us that he was kept prisoner by a burn. At first he called “the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” the “dear old ballad,” and the lines,—
“Yon crescent Moon is fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue”
were followed by—
“A boat becalm’d, a lovely sky-canoe”
It was natural to him at first to address Wordsworth as
“O Friend! O Teacher! God’s great gift to me!”
and it became natural to him to cut out the last phrase. Formerly Geraldine said to Christabel, “I’m better now”; and instead of lying entranced she lay “in fits.” The poem still includes the phrase describing Christabel’s eyes,—
“Each about to have a tear;”
while “Frost at Midnight” retains the allusion to the “fluttering stranger” in the fire, the filmy blue flame, as a note instructs us, “supposed to portend the arrival of some absent friend.” There is, too, a whole class of homely poems, on receiving the news of his child’s birth, on being warned not to bathe in the sea: “God be with thee, gladsome Ocean,” it begins.