BOTH.

Who bade you do't?

FAMINE.

The same! the same!

Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose, and cried Halloo!
To him alone the praise is due.

FIRE.

Sisters! I from Ireland came!
Hedge and corn-fields all on flame,
I triumphed o'er the setting sun!
And all the while the work was done,
On as I strode with my huge strides,
I flung back my head and I held my sides,
It was so rare a piece of fun

To see the sweltered cattle run

With uncouth gallop through the night,
Scared by the red and noisy light!
By the light of his own blazing cot
Was many a naked rebel shot:

The house-stream met the flame and hissed,
While crash! fell in the roof, I wist,
On some of those old bed-rid nurses,
That deal in discontent and curses.

BOTH.

Who bade you do't?

FIRE.

The same! the same!

Letters four do form his name.
He let me loose, and cried Halloo !
To him alone the praise is due.

ALL.

He let us loose, and cried Halloo !
How shall we yield him honour due?

FAMINE.

Wisdom comes with lack of food.
I'll gnaw, I'll gnaw the multitude,
Till the cup of rage o'erbrim :
They shall seize him and his brood-

SLAUGHTER.

They shall tear him limb from limb!

FIRE.

O thankless beldames and untrue!
And is this all that you can do
For him, who did so much for you?
Ninety months he, by my troth!
Hath richly catered for you both;

And in an hour would you repay
An eight years' work?-Away! away!
I alone am faithful! I

Cling to him everlastingly.

THE DEVIL'S THOUGHTS.

I.

FROM his brimstone bed at break of day
A walking the Devil is gone,

To visit his snug little farm the Earth,
And see how his stock goes on.

II.

Over the hill and over the dale,

And he went over the plain,

And backward and forward he switched his long tail As a gentleman switches his cane.

III.

And how then was the Devil drest?

Oh! he was in his Sunday's best:

His jacket was red and his breeches were blue, And there was a hole where the tail came through

IV.

He saw a Lawyer killing a viper

On a dunghill hard by his own stable;

And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind

Of Cain and his brother Abel.

V.

He saw an Apothecary on a white horse

Ride by on his vocations;

And the Devil thought of his old friend
Death in the Revelations.

VI.

He saw a cottage with a double coach-house,

A cottage of gentility;

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
Is pride that apes humility.

VII.

He peeped into a rich bookseller's shop,
Quoth he, "We are both of one college!
For I sate myself, like a cormorant, once
Hard by the tree of knowledge."

* And all amid them stood the tree of life

High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit

Of vegetable gold (query paper money :) and next to Life

Our Death, the tree of knowledge, grew fast by.

e

VIII.

Down the river did glide, with wind and with tide,
A pig with vast celerity;

And the Devil look'd wise as he saw how the while,
It cut its own throat. "There!" quoth he with a smile,
"Goes England's commercial prosperity."

IX.

As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw
A solitary cell;

And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint
For improving his prisons in Hell.

X.

He saw a Turnkey in a trice

Fetter a troublesome blade;

"Nimbly," quoth he, "do the fingers move
If a man be but used to his trade,"

XI.

He saw the same Turnkey unfetter a man
With but little expedition,

Which put him in mind of the long debate
On the Slave-trade abolition.

XII.

He saw an old acquaintance

As he passed by a Methodist meeting ;

She holds a consecrated key,

And the Devil nods her a greeting.

XIII.

She turned up her nose, and said,
"Avaunt! my name's Religion,"
And she looked to Mr.

And leered like a love-sick pigeon.

So clomb this first grand thief

Thence up he flew, and on the tree of life
Sat like a cormorant.

Par. Lost, iv. The allegory here is so apt, that in a catalogue of various readings obtained from collating the MSS. one might expect to find it noted, that for "life" Cod. quid. habent, "trade." Though indeed the trade, i.e. the bibliopolic, so called Kar' ¿žóny, may be regarded as Life sensu eminentiori; a suggestion, which I owe to a young retailer in the hosiery line, who on hearing a description of the net profits, dinner parties, country houses, &c. of the trade, exclaimed, "Ay! that's what I call Life now !"-This "Life, our Death," is thus happily contrasted with the fruits of authorship-Sic nos non nobis mellificamus apes. Of this poem, which with the Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, first appeared in the Morning Post, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 9th, and 16th stanzas were dictated by Mr. Southey. See Apologetic Preface.

If any one should ask who General meant, the Author begs leave to inform him, that he did once see a red-faced person in a dream whom by the dress he took for a General; but he might have been mistaken, and most certainly he did not hear any names mentioned. In simple verity, the author never meant any one, or indeed any thing but to put a concluding stanza to his doggerel.

burning face

He saw with consternation,

And back to hell his way did he take,
For the Devil thought by a slight mistake
It was general conflagration.

Sept. 6, 1799.

KUBLA KHAN; OR, A VISION IN A DREAM.

A FRAGMENT.

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 anodyne had been prescribed, from the effect of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment 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 enclosed 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

Is broken-all that phantom-world so fair

Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread,

And each mis-shape the other. Stay awhile,

Poor youth who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes

The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon
The visions will return! And lo! he stays,
And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms

Come trembling back, unite, and now once more

The pool becomes a mirror.

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. A piov ädiov äσw: but the to-morrow is yet to come.

1816.

IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw :

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me