O! take my life, or let me pass The perils, erst with steadfast eye Not half enough to part from Thee !* ON TAKING LEAVE OF 1817. O know, to esteem, to love—and then to part, Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart! O for some dear abiding-place of Love, O'er which my spirit, like the mother dove, The forms of memory all my mental food, And dream of you, sweet sisters, (ah, not mine!) And only dream of you (ah, dream and pine!) Than have the presence, and partake the pride, And shine in the eye of all the world beside! THE PANG MORE SHARP THAN ALL. AN ALLEGORY. I. E too has flitted from his secret nest, HE Hope's last and dearest child without a name! Has flitted from me, like the warmthless flame, That makes false promise of a place of rest *See Note at the end of the Volume. To the tired Pilgrim's still believing mind; II. Wes! Of babe, that tempts and shuns the menaced kiss, As the dear hopes, that swell the mother's breast: III. Like a loose blossom on a gusty night Two playmates, twin-births of his foster-dame : IV. Ah! He is gone, and yet will not depart ! Which there he made up-grow by his strong art, V. Can wit of man a heavier grief reveal? One pang more blighting-keen than hope betrayed! When at her Brother's hest, the twin-born Maid * Faerie Queen, в. III. c. 2. s. 19. 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 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 effect 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 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 Poor youth who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon 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 ǎdiov aow: 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. KUBLA KHAN. N Xanadu did Kubla Khan IN 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 1816. With walls and towers were girdled round: But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seeth ing, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced : |