All look and likeness caught from earth,
All accident of kin and birth,
Had pass'd away. There was no trace
Of aught on that illumined face,
Uprais'd beneath the rifted stone 5
But of one spirit all her own;—
She, she herself, and only she,
Shone through her body visibly.
1805.
FOOTNOTES:
[393:1] These lines, without title or heading, are quoted ('vide . . . my lines') in an entry in one of Coleridge's Malta Notebooks, dated Feb. 8, 1805, to illustrate the idea that the love-sense can be abstracted from the accidents of form or person (see Anima Poetae, 1895, p. 120). It follows that they were written before that date. Phantom was first published in 1834, immediately following (ii. 71) Phantom or Fact. A dialogue in Verse, which was first published in 1828, and was probably written about that time. Both poems are 'fragments from the life of dreams'; but it was the reality which lay behind both 'phantom' and 'fact' of which the poet dreamt, having his eyes open. With lines 4, 5 compare the following stanza of one of the MS. versions of the Dark Ladié:—
Against a grey stone rudely carv'd
The statue of an armed knight,
She lean'd in melancholy mood
To watch ['d] the lingering Light.
A SUNSET[393:2]
Upon the mountain's edge with light touch resting,
There a brief while the globe of splendour sits
And seems a creature of the earth; but soon
More changeful than the Moon,
To wane fantastic his great orb submits, [5]
Or cone or mow of fire: till sinking slowly
Even to a star at length he lessens wholly.
Abrupt, as Spirits vanish, he is sunk!
A soul-like breeze possesses all the wood.
The boughs, the sprays have stood [10]
As motionless as stands the ancient trunk!
But every leaf through all the forest flutters,
And deep the cavern of the fountain mutters.