Must needs express his love's excess (O sorrow and shame should this be true!) Comes seldom save from rage and pain, KUBLA KHAN; OR, A VISION IN A DREAM. A FRAGMENT. THE following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity, and as far as the Author's own opinions are concerned, rather as a psychological curiosity, than on the ground of any supposed poetic merits. In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm house between Porlock and Linton, on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire. In consequence of a slight indisposition, an ancdyne had been prescribed, from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading the following sentence, or words of the same substance, in "Purchas's Pilgrimage:" "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall." The author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone had been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter: Then all the charm thine eyes Is broken-all that phantom-world so fair Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him, Zapergov adion now but the to-morrow is yet to come. As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease. Note to the first Edition, 1816. IN Xanadu did KUBLA KHAN A stately pleasure-dome decree : So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round : But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, The shadow of the dome of pleasure Where was heard the mingled measure It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! In a vision once I saw : It was an Abyssinian maid And on her dulcimer she played, Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight 'twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! THE PAINS OF SLEEP. ERE on my bed my limbs I lay, No wish conceived, no thought expressed! A sense o'er all my soul impressed That I am weak, yet not unblest, Since in me, round me, every where But yester-night I prayed aloud Of shapes and thoughts that tortured me: Sense of intolerable wrong, And whom I scorned, those only strong! So two nights passed: the night's dismay Sleep, the wide blessing, seemed to me The third night, when my own loud scream And having thus by tears subdued The unfathomable hell within And whom I love, I love indeed. LOVE. ALL thoughts, all passions, all delights, And feed his sacred flame. Oft in my waking dreams do I The moonshine, stealing o'er the scene, She leant against the armed man, Few sorrows hath she of her own, The songs that make her grieve. I played a soft and doleful air, She listened with a flitting blush, I told her of the Knight that wore I told her how he pined; and ah! She listened with a flitting blush, But when I told the cruel scorn That crazed that bold and lovely Knight, That sometimes from the savage den, In green and sunny glade,— There came and looked him in the face An angel beautiful and bright; And that he knew it was a Fiend, This miserable Knight! And that unknowing what he did, He leaped amid a murderous band, And saved from outrage worse than death The Lady of the Land ; And how she wept, and clasped his knees; And how she tended him in vain And ever strove to expiate The scorn that crazed his brain ;- And that she nursed him in a cave; His dying words-but when I reached |