“The Night-Mare Life-in-death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.”
“Yes, the other is worse! I can hardly tell why, except it be that you get at the sense of it easier. What does the Nightmare Life-in-Death mean?”
“I don't know. I can't quite get at it.”
How should he? Richard was too close to the awful phantom to know that this was her portrait.
“There's another dreadful stanza in the first edition,” he went on. “It is repeated in the second, but left out in the last. I fancy the poet let himself be overpersuaded to omit it. The poem was not actually printed without it until after his death: he had only put it in the errata, to be omitted.—When the woman whistles with joy at having won the ancient Mariner,
“'A gust of wind sterte up behind,'
“—as if, like the sailors, she had whistled for it:—
“'A gust of wind sterte up behind,
And whistled through his bones;
Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth,
Half whistles and half groans;'
“and the spectre-bark is blown along by this breath coming out of the bosom of the skeleton.”
“I think it was a great mistake to leave that verse out!” said Barbara. “There is no nasty horror in it! There is a little in the description of Death!”