copy of the poem once the property of Wordsworth's sister-in-law, Sarah Hutchinson, and recently published in facsimile by Mr.E.H.Coleridge, which gives this reading for ll.

253-4: "Are lean and old and foul of hue, And she is to sleep by Christabel." Coleridge seems to have tried both ways, that of revealing Geraldine's loathsome secret and that of leaving it an unknown and nameless horror, and finally to have chosen the latter, just as he rejected in later editions the charnel-house particulars in the description of Death in "The Ancient Mariner." Unquestionably he was right.

The horror that is merely suggested and left shrouded in mystery for the imagination to work on is more powerful than that which is known.

The suppressed line, however, helps us in an age less familiar with notions of the supernatural to understand what Geraldine is.

The character is conceived upon the general lines of Duessa in the first book of "The Faerie Queene;" a being of great external loveliness, but within "full of all uncleanness." Observe also that the thought, shrouded here, is half revealed later (l.