The condition of Kate is exactly that of Coleridge's
'_Ancient Mariner_.' But possibly, reader, you may be amongst the
many careless readers that have never fully understood what that
condition was. Suffer me to enlighten you, else you ruin the story of
the mariner; and by losing all its pathos, lose half the jewels of its
beauty.
There are three readers of the 'Ancient Mariner.' The first is gross
enough to fancy all the imagery of the mariner's visions delivered by
the poet for actual facts of experience; which being impossible, the
whole pulverizes, for that reader, into a baseless fairy tale. The
second reader is wiser than _that_; he knows that the imagery is _not_
baseless; it is the imagery of febrile delirium; really seen, but not
seen as an external reality. The mariner had caught the pestilential
fever, which carried off all his mates; he only had survived--the
delirium had vanished; but the visions that had haunted the delirium
remained. 'Yes,' says the third reader, 'they remained; naturally they
did, being scorched by fever into his brain; but how did they happen to
remain on his belief as gospel truths? The delirium had vanished: why
had not the painted scenery of the delirium vanished, except as
visionary memorials of a sorrow that was cancelled? Why was it that
craziness settled upon this mariner's brain, driving him, as if he were
a Cain, or another Wandering Jew, to 'pass like night--from land to
land;' and, at uncertain intervals, wrenching him until he made
rehearsal of his errors, even at the hard price of 'holding children
from their play, and old men from the chimney corner?' [Footnote: The
beautiful words of Sir Philip Sidney, in his '_Defense of Poesie_.
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