  Low-lying excited states as well as the ground state of the spin-1 antiferro-
magnetic Heisenberg chain with a spin-1/2 impurity are investigated by means of
a variational method and a method of numerical diagonalization. It is shown
that 1) the impurity spin brings about massive modes in the Haldane gap, 2)
when the the impurity-host coupling is sufficiently weak, the phenomenological
Hamiltonian used by Hagiwara {\it et al.} in the analysis of ESR experimental
results for NENP containing a small amount of spin-1/2 Cu impurities is
equivalent to a more realistic Hamiltonian, as far as the energies of the
low-lying states are concerned, 3) the results obtained by the variational
method are in semi-quantitatively good agreement with those obtained by the
numerical diagonalization.

Condensed Matter