BARTRAMS INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE 137 



as well as Bartram as possible sources of the stanza in question, 

 and comes to the conclusion that " Here, then, for a single 

 passage in The Rime are two, or three, reminiscences from ' the 

 elder poets ' as against one from a book of travels." -^ This 

 too is plausible. However, the parallels first cited by Professor 

 Cooper are striking, especially when we consider the use of 

 Bartram that Coleridge made in several earlier stanzas in the 

 same poem, such as in his description of a storm and of an 

 aurora. Coleridge's " all little birds that are " which " seemed 

 to fill the sea and air With their sweet jargoning " look sus- 

 piciously like Bartram' s millions of " small birds " filling the 

 " woods, the groves and meads . . . with their melody," and 

 while Coleridge, being a poet, makes a specific bird, a sky-lark, 

 " Sometimes a-dropping from the sky," yet Bartram' s birds also 

 appeared suddenly, " as if they dropped down from the skies." 

 In Part VII of " The Ancient Mariner " appears the line 



And the owlet whoops to the wolf below (536) 



upon which Professor Lowes remarks, " In that part of the book 

 [ Bartram' s Travels] which Coleridge read most intently, only 

 four pages from the Great Sink, a dozen from the Seminoles, 

 and a score from the Savanna crane, Bartram tells of observing 

 ' a company of wolves . . . under a few trees . . . sitting on 

 their hinder parts.' ' We then whooped,' he adds.-^ And unless 

 all signs fail, the owlet's whoop to the wolf below echoed in 

 Coleridge's memory that whoop to the wolves in Florida." '^ 



Two other passages in the poem invite comment. One is the 

 lines about the water-snakes which the Mariner watched: 



Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, 

 They coiled and swam; and every track 

 Was a flash of golden fire (79-81). 



According to Professor Lowes the snakes themselves came out 

 of Edward Cooke's Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the 

 World in 1708-11,'^ but part of their coloring was suggested 

 by Bartram's bream or sun fish: "pale gold (or burnished 



" p. M. L. A., XLII, 589-590. '' Xanadu, pp. 215-16. 



" Travels, 199. " Ibid., 479. 



