All the buds and bells of May And thou shalt quaff it;-thou shalt hear Rustle of the reaped corn; Sweet birds antheming the morn: And in the same moment-hark! 'Tis the early April lark, Or the rooks, with busy caw, Sapphire queen of the Mid-May; And every leaf, and every flower Pearlèd with the selfsame shower. Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see When the hen-bird's wing doth rest Quiet on her mossy nest; Then the hurry and alarm When the bee-hive casts its swarm; Acorns ripe down-pattering While the autumn breezes sing. O sweet Fancy! let her loose; Where's the cheek that doth not fade, White as Hebe's, when her zone And Jove grew languid.-Break the mesh. Quickly break her prison-string, And such joys as these she'll bring. -Let the wingèd Fancy roam! Pleasure never is at home. John Keats 172 KUBLA KHAN OR, A VISION IN A DREAM. A FRAGMENT1 N Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Through caverns measureless to man So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: 1 The following fragment is here published at the request of a poet of great and deserved celebrity [Lord Byron], 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 farmhouse 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 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 has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter! 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. Apiov ädiov aoû [A sweeter (song) will I sing tomorrow]: but the to-morrow is yet to come. [From the author's introductory note.] And here were forests ancient as the hills, 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 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, 173 Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me To such a deep delight 'twould win me, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! IN Samuel Taylor Coleridge THE HAUNTED PALACE N the greenest of our valleys Once a fair and stately palace_ In the monarch Thought's dominion- Never seraph spread a pinion Over fabric half so fair! Banners yellow, glorious, golden, Time long ago), And every gentle air that dallied, In that sweet day, Along the ramparts plumed and pallid, |