His poetry is, even more than Wordsworth's, unequal; he is capable of large tracts of dreariness and flatness; he seldom finished what he began.

The _Ancient Mariner_, indeed, which was the fruit of his close companionship with Wordsworth, is the only completed thing of the highest quality in the whole of his work.
_Christabel_ is a splendid fragment; for years the first part lay uncompleted and when the odd accident of an evening's intoxication led him to commence the second, the inspiration had fled.

For the second part, by giving to the fairy atmosphere of the first a local habitation and a name, robbed it of its most precious quality; what it gave in exchange was something the public could get better from Scott.

_Kubla Khan_ went unfinished because the call of a friend broke the thread of the reverie in which it was composed.

In the end came opium and oceans of talk at Highgate and fouled the springs of poetry.