we come to the last word of the fourth line, we pass into a higher region: "haunted!" Haunted by what?

"By woman wailing for her demon lover."

On this single line is stamped the power of a great poet; that is, a poet in whom breadth and depth of intellectual and sympathetic endowment give to the refining aspiring poetic faculty material to work upon drawn from the grander, subtler, remoter resources of the human soul, — material beyond the reach of any but poets of the first order, whose right, indeed, to a place in this order rests upon their power of higher spiritual reach united to wider intellectual range. How much is involved in this short passage! A landscape gift, to present in two lines a clear picture of the "savage place;" then, by a leap of the poet's imagination, the scene is overhung by an earthly atmosphere that makes it so holy and enchanted that (and here the poet takes the final great leap) it is fit, "under a waning moon," to be haunted

"By woman wailing for her demon lover."

That is a poetically imaginative leap of the boldest and most beautiful. What an ethereal

springiness, what an intellectual swing, in the mind that could make such a leap! That particular one Coleridge's friend Wordsworth could not have made, strong as he was in poetic imagination. It implies almost something spectral, superearthly, something uncanny. And what an exquisitely musical rhythm the thought weaves about itself for its poetic incarnation.

Kubla Khan is a fragment, just as is a much longer, and his greatest, poem, Christabel. In the autumn of 1797 Coleridge, then in poor health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse on the confines of Somerset and Devonshire. One day, from the effect of an anodyne, prescribed to him, he fell asleep in his chair while reading in Purchas's Pilgrimage a passage like this: "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." He slept about three hours. When he awoke he seemed to have composed two or three hundred lines describing what, in this sleep of the outward senses, he had inwardly seen and heard. So vivid was his recollection that immediately on awaking he seized a pen and began to write as

one would when dictated to. In the midst of his writing he was called out on business. And he went out! Suppose a great statesman and orator, in the full swing of a grave momentous speech before a public assembly, to be suddenly interrupted and asked to listen to a young lady's dream! Not more impertinent were this than the interruption of Coleridge by a call of outward business. Nay, it were so much the less impertinent as the poetic dreams of Coleridge were more freighted with wisdom and enduring thought than any statesman's oration. To permit himself to be arrested in an immortal flight, as was this of Kubla Khan! to lay down his pen and go out to talk to some intruder, from a small neighboring town, about a prosaic, insignificant, transitory, delusive matter of fact! And he who was a bungler at these every-day opacities, and was an expert at translucent ideals. The business of Coleridge was to dream poetic dreams, not to act. So grand and new and beautiful and significant were his dreams that, like works of Art, they become stimulative and generative of high thoughts in others. In Coleridge there was so deep an inwardness that, when abstracted from the outer world,

whether in a trance-like sleep, as when he produced Kubla Khan, or in exalted soliloquy, there poured forth, from large sources of sensibility and reason, streams of richly-worded invention, floods of imaginative thought.

When, after a detention of an hour, he came back and resumed his pen, the vision had faded. And so, Kubla Khan, like other of Coleridge's work, is a brilliant fragment.

Kubla Khan is likewise typical of Coleridge's poetry in that it is more spiritual than passionate. Coleridge, while, as poet, appealing to and touching the feelings, was not a man of fervent predominant desires. His sensibilities as sound as they were delicate

were not fortified by depth and warmth of passion he was more tender than impassioned.

In its shining superexcellence the poetical looks extravagant and visionary, in its prepotency it seems preposterous. And this for the same reason why, with our earthly eyes, we cannot see any of the millions of spiritual creatures that "walk the earth both when we wake and when we sleep;" our vision is not enough spiritualized. The best function of the poetical is to ascend to the interior spiritual

source; and to follow it thither is not easy. The poetical is a divine flame, in whose transfiguring light the concrete grossness of earthly realities being fused, the causative law of their being becomes discernible. When in the Sermon on the Mount we are enjoined to "love your enemies, bless those that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in heaven," we listen in despair, all this so transcends our conceptions. These injunctions are a poetic ideal reached by the utterer of them through the sublime spirituality of his nature. Dwelling habitually on this upper plane, he was enabled to seize the higher possibilities of humanity. Like the Beatitudes and the rest of this transcendent Sermon, these injunctions are the poetry of the moral sense. To the sensuous, and still more to the sensual, ear they sound impracticable, Utopian. They are a voice from the supreme altitudes, proclaiming to what elevations we are capable of mounting.

In the Ancient Mariner, the hero of that great poem, after shooting the Albatross, ex claims,