The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poems, Plays, Essays, Lectures, Autobiography & Personal Letters (Illustrated). Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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      THE CHASM IN XANADU.

      "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!"

       (Kubla Khan).

      I never find myself alone within the embracement of rocks and hills ... but my spirit careers, drives and eddies like a leaf in autumn; a wild activity of thoughts, imaginations, feelings and impulses of motion rises up within me.... The further I ascend from animated nature ... the greater in me becomes the intensity of the feeling of life. Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has nor can have an opposite. God is everywhere, and where is there room for death?

      And he determinedly developed in his theory of poetry, his sense of the depths that lie below nature's more superficial aspects. He had accorded to his sleeping babe, a few short months before, that tenderest of all benedictions, that gift of untarnishable joy:

      Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

       Whether the summer clothe the general earth

       With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

       Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

       Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

       Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

       Heard only in the trances of the blast,

       Or if the secret ministry of frost

       Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

       Quietly shining to the quiet Moon:

      and he had conversed at great length and frequency with Wordsworth, on what he termed "the two cardinal points of poetry—the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm which accidents of light and shade, which moonlight or sunset diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature." He had no greater pleasure possible than to steep himself in "the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us: an inexhaustible treasure," he proclaimed, "but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand." And when his imagination craved some wilder and more romantic outlook than the peaceful village where,

      beside one friend,

       Beneath the impervious covert of one oak,

       I've raised a lowly shed, and know the names

       Of Husband and of Father,—

      that imagination could at will supply its wants. His eyes could "make pictures when they are shut," and could carry him momentarily, as on some magic carpet, to a dreamland beyond the limitations of mortal experience. The same exquisite and meticulous perception which enabled Coleridge to realize and remember the double sound of rain, the "quiet sounds from hidden rills," among the heather, the slanting shower of blossoms on the "faint gale of departing May,"—revealed to him how

      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!

       · · · · · · · 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!

      Such, in fact, was the dual capacity of Coleridge's mind,—such its ability to commingle the actual and the imaginary, that whilst he could at one moment paint the gentle English landscape in which he dwelt,—

      Low was our pretty Cot; our tallest Rose

       Peeped at the chamber-window. We could hear

       At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,

       The Sea's faint murmur. In the open air

       Our Myrtles blossom'd; and across the Porch

       Thick Jasmins twin'd: the little landscape round,

       Was green and woody, and refresh'd the eye.

       It was a spot which you might aptly call

       The Valley of Seclusion!

      he was enabled to describe, with the verisimilitude of perfect memory, the dim sea-reaches where,—

      ... Now there came both mist and snow,

       And it grew wondrous cold:

       And ice, mast-high, came floating by,

       As green as emerald.

      And through the drifts the snowy clifts

       Did send a dismal sheen:

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