He amused his listeners at Highgate with a continuation of the plot; and in 1833 he declared that if he "were perfectly free from vexation and were in the _ad libitum_ hearing of fine music" he could yet finish "Christabel," "for I have, as I always had, the whole plan entire from beginning to end in my mind; but I fear I could not carry on with equal success the execution of the idea." Wordsworth had a different recollection.

He told Coleridge's nephew in 1836 that he did not think Coleridge "had ever conceived, in his own mind, any definite plan for it; that the poem had been composed while they were in habits of daily intercourse, and almost in his presence, and when there was the most unreserved intercourse between them as to all their literary projects and productions, and he had never heard from him any plan for finishing it"; and added, what is fully borne out by a study of Coleridge's life: "schemes of this sort passed rapidly and vividly through his mind, and so impressed him, that he often fancied he had arranged things, which really, and upon trial, proved to be mere embryos." "The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain," wrote Longfellow, alluding to "The Dolliver Romance" that Hawthorne left incomplete at his death.

There is strong kinship, moral and artistic, between Coleridge and Hawthorne; both believed that the heart is more than the head, and neither could force his imagination to work under unfavorable conditions.

But Hawthorne's failure of imagination came at the end of a fruitful and consistent career, and his life failed with it; in Coleridge the poet died half a lifetime before the man, and left the man--the preacher and philosopher--to lament his loss.
Whether or not Coleridge had the story complete in his mind, what we have is a fragment, and does not enable us to divine, as some broken statues do, the plan of the whole.

What it gives us is the romantic mood, the sense of "witchery by daylight," and this it does more hauntingly than anything else in the English language.