Page:Lyra heroica.djvu/375

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Rokeby (1813), III. 16; the Pibroch was published in 1816; Tht Omnipotent and The Red Harlaw are from The Antiquary (1816), and the Farewell from The Pirate (1821). As for Bonny Dundee, that incomparable ditty, it was written as late as 1825. ' The air of Bonny Dundee running in my head to-day,' he writes under date of 22d December (Diary, 1890, i. 61), 'I wrote a few verses to it be/ore dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688-9. / wonder if they are good.' See The Doom ofDevorgoil (1830), Note A, Act n. sc. 2.

��This unsurpassed piece of art, in which a music the most exquis- ite is used to body forth a set of suggestions that seem dictated by the very Spirit of Romance, was produced, under the influence of ' an anodyne,' as early as 1797. Coleridge, who calls it Kubla Khan: A Vision within a Dream, avers that, having fallen asleep in his chair over a sentence from Purchas's Pilgrimage 'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereto ; and thus ten miles of ground were enclosed with a wall,' he remained unconscious for about three hours, ' during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than three hundred lines'; 'if that,' he adds, 'can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent ex- pressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.' On awakening, he proceeded to write out his ' composition,' and had set down as much of it as is printed here, when ' he was unfortu- nately called out by a person on business from Porlock,' whose departure, an hour after, left him wellnigh oblivious of the rest. This confession, which is dated 1816, has been generally accepted as true ; but Coleridge had a trick of dreaming dreams about him- self which makes doubt permissible.

��LXIV

From the Hellenics (written in I>atin. 1814-20, and translated into English at the instance of Lady Blcssington), 1846. See Colvin, LanJor (' English Men of Letters'), pp. 189, 190.

��Of the first, ' Napoleon and the British Sailor ' ( The Pilgrim of Glencoe, 1842), Campbell writes that the 'anecdote has been pub- lished in several public journals, both French and English.' ' My belief,' he continues, ' in its authenticity was confirmed by an Eng- lishman, long resident in Boulogne, lately telling me that he remem- bered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the

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