“The sun’s course is short, but clear and blue the sky.”
[179] “Duplex nobis vinculum, et amicitiæ et similium junctarumque Camœnarum; quod utinam neque mors solvat, neque temporis longinquitas.”
[180] The Task, Book V., “A Winter’s Morning Walk.”
[181] A later version of these lines is to be found at the close of the fourth book of “The Excursion.” Works of Wordsworth, 1889, p. 467.
[182] In the series of letters to Dr. Estlin, contributed to the privately printed volumes of the Philobiblon Society, the editor, Mr. Henry A. Bright, dates this letter May (? 1797). A comparison with a second letter to Estlin, dated May 14, 1798 (Letter LXXXII.), with a letter to Poole, dated May 28, 1798 (Letter LXXXIV.), with a letter to Charles Lamb belonging to the spring of 1798 (Letter LXXXV.), and with an entry in Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal for May 16, 1798, affords convincing proof that the date of the letter should be May, 1798.
The MS. note of November 10, 1810, to which a previous reference has been made, connects a serious quarrel with Lloyd, and consequent distress of mind, with the retirement to “the lonely farm-house,” and a first recourse to opium. If, as the letters intimate, these events must be assigned to May, 1798, it follows that “Kubla Khan” was written at the same time, and not, as Coleridge maintained in the Preface of 1816, “in the summer of 1797.”
It would, indeed, have been altogether miraculous if, before he had written a line of “Christabel,” or “The Ancient Mariner,” either in an actual dream, or a dreamlike reverie, it had been “given to him” to divine the enchanting images of “Kubla Khan,” or attune his mysterious vision to consummate melody.
[183] Berkeley Coleridge, born May 14, 1798, died February 10, 1799.
[184] The original MS. of this letter, which was preserved by Coleridge, is, doubtless, a copy of that sent by post. Besides this, only three of Coleridge’s letters to Lamb have been preserved,—the “religious letter” of 1796, a letter concerning the quarrel with Wordsworth, of May, 1812 [Letter CLXXXIV.], and one written in later life (undated, on the particulars of Hood’s Odes to Great People).
[185] Charles Lloyd.