NOTES TO THE POEMS
in 1798, Coleridge treating supernatural subjects and
Wordsworth themes from everyday life. He lived for
some time near Wordsworth, at Keswick ; and later he
moved to London, where he lectured on Shakespeare.
Towards the end of his life he became a victim to
opium, which deadened his intellectual powers. He
successfully overcame this habit, however, and spent
the last years of his life contentedly at Highgate.
Coleridge gives the following account of the com-
position of this poem :—
66 In the summer of the year 1797, the Author, then
in ill-health, had retired to a lonely farm-house be-
tween 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 e Purchas's Pilgrim-
age ' : ' Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace
to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus
ten miles of fertile ground were enclosed by a wall.'
The Author continued for about three hours in a pro-
found 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 corresponding 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 unfortun-
ately 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 mor-
tification, 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
has been cast, but alas! without the after restoration
of the latter ! "
The following is the actual passage that Coleridge
was reading when he fell asleep :—
199