“Ah wel-a-day!”—
“For this is alone in”—
“And didst bring her home with thee in love and in charity”—
“I pray you drink this cordial wine”—
“Sir Leoline”—
“And found a bright lady surpassingly fair”—
“Tu—whit!——Tu—whoo!”
‘Kubla Khan is given to the public, it seems, “at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity;”—but whether Lord Byron the praiser of “the Christabel,” or the Laureate, the praiser of Princes, we are not informed. As far as Mr. Coleridge’s “own opinions are concerned,” it is published, “not upon the ground of any poetic merits,” but “as a PSYCHOLOGICAL CURIOSITY!” In these opinions of the candid author, we entirely concur; but for this reason we hardly think it was necessary to give the minute detail which the Preface contains, of the circumstances attending its composition. Had the question regarded “Paradise Lost,” or “Dryden’s Ode” we could not have had a more particular account of the circumstances in which it was composed. It was in the year 1797, and the summer season. Mr. Coleridge was in bad health;—the particular disease is not given; but the careful reader will form his own conjectures. He had retired very prudently to a lonely farm-house; and whoever would see the place which gave birth to the “psychological curiosity,” may find his way thither without a guide; for it is situated on the confines of Somerset and Devonshire, and on the Exmoor part of the boundary; and it is, moreover, between Porlock and Linton. In that farm-house, he had a slight indisposition, and had taken an anodyne, which threw him into a deep sleep in his chair, (whether after dinner or not he omits to state), “at the moment that he was reading a sentence in Purchas’s Pilgrims,” relative to a palace of Kubla Khan. The effects of the anodyne, and the sentence together, were prodigious: They produced the “curiosity” now before us; for, during his three-hours sleep, Mr. Coleridge “has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines.” On awaking, he “instantly and eagerly” wrote down the verses here published; when he was (he says “unfortunately”) called out by a “person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour;” and when he returned, the vision was gone. The lines here given smell strongly, it must be owned, of the anodyne; and, but that an under dose of a sedative produces contrary effects, we should inevitably have been lulled by them into forgetfulness of all things. Perhaps a dozen more such lines as the following would reduce the most irritable of critics to a state of inaction.
“A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw: