r part of the seventeenth century. But the return to free
accentual verse in the "Christabel" was an innovation at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. It is to be noted, too, that there are lines
of three and even of two accents in Part I.

In chap. XV. of the _Biographia Literaria_, in a list of the "specific
symptoms of poetic power" in Shakespeare's early work, Coleridge places
first "the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the
subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words....
The sense of musical delight, with the power of producing it, is a gift
of imagination; and this, together with the power of reducing multitude
into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one
predominant thought or feeling, may be cultivated and improved, but can
never be learnt. It is in these that _Poeta nascitur non fit_."

"Kubla Khan" is the remembered fragment of a dream. All that we know
about it is contained in the note Coleridge prefixed to it in the
pamphlet of 1816. In the summer of 1798 (Coleridge says 1797, but this
seems to have been a slip of his memory[1]) "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 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 smal