Coleridge says ("Table Talk" May 31, 1830): "I took the thought of 'grinning for joy' from my companion's remark to me, when we had climbed to the top of Plinlimmon [in Wales, in the summer of 1794], and were nearly dead with thirst.

We could not speak from the constriction, till we found a little puddle under a stone.

He said to me: 'You grinned like an idiot.' He had done the same." To "grin" was originally to snarl and show the teeth as animals do when angry.

"They go to and fro in the evening: they grin like a dog, and run about through the city," Ps.LIX., 6, Prayer-Book Version, where the King James Version has "make a noise like a dog." Hence idiots, stupid people, foolish people, all who are or who demean themselves below the dignity of man, _grin_ rather than smile; and so the Mariner's companions, their muscles stiffened by drought, could show their gladness only by the contortions of a grin, not by a natural smile of joy.
169--*Without a breeze, without a tide*.

The Phantom Ship is a wide-spread sailor's superstition that has been often used in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century.