She cited Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner, " with its frozen polar wastes and specters of "Nightmare Life-in-Death, " which as an 8-year-old child she had heard the poet recite in her father's parlor, and she made several dark allusions to the alchemical experiments of Paracelsus and CorneliusAgrippa, two Medieval figures with whom Percy had become obsessed during his studies at Oxford.