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Updated: May 9, 2025
It can not be to enjoy fine palaces and have a great many soldiers, for Marco Polo tells us that the great Kubla Khan had palaces of gold and precious stones of incredible extent and most sumptuous magnificence, such as the world has never seen from that day to this, and could number his troops by millions; yet nobody will undertake to say that the Tartars of the tenth century were in advance of the French of the nineteenth century.
This plate was evidently one of the Carceri set sixteen in all which the etcher improvised after some severe cerebral malady. What would we not give to have heard the poet of Kubla Khan describing the fantastic visions of the Venetian artist to the English opium eater! The eloquence of the prose passage we have transcribed has in it some faint echoes of Coleridge's golden rumble.
Liberal beyond precedent, Kubla Khan encouraged the establishment of a Christian bishopric, in which John de Monte Corvino was the first representative of the Holy See. He also welcomed those adventurous Italians, the Polos, and sought to make use of them to open communication with Europe.
And there were certain phrases in Kubla Khan that had such a magic that he would sometimes wake up, as it were, to the consciousness that he had been lying on the bed or sitting in the chair by the bureau, repeating a single line over and over again for two or three hours.
One says, it is like a hive covered by a swarm of burning bees; others, that it is the enchanted palace in the gardens of Gul in the depths of the Arabian nights, like a gigantic tiara set with wonderful diamonds, larger than those which Sinbad found in the roc's valley, like the palace of the fairies in the dreams of childhood, like the stately pleasure-dome of Kubla Khan in Xanadu, and twenty other whimsical things.
In the same way opium raised into the region of brilliant vision that passage of Purchas which Coleridge was reading before he dreamed Kubla Khan. But in Tennyson the effects were deliberately sought and secured. One might conjecture, though Lord Tennyson says nothing on the subject, that among the suggestions for The Princess was the opening of Love's Labour's Lost.
Methinks sweet spices breathe from out the cave." "Hail, Donjalolo, King of Juam," now sounded with acclamations from the groves. Starting, the young prince beheld a multitude approaching: warriors with spears, and maidens with flowers; and Kubla, a priest, lifting on high the tasseled girdle of Teei, and waving it toward him. The young chiefs fell back.
Another strangely beautiful poem, Kubla Khan which came to him, he said, in sleep is even more fragmentary. And the most important of his prose remains, his Biographia Literaria, 1817, a history of his own opinions, breaks off abruptly. It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's great service to posterity resided.
The American army is about equal in numbers to the corps of officers of Germany's army and navy. To the American, as to almost every other foreigner, the German army means only one thing: war. We all hear one thing: "And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war." I believe this is a half-truth, and dangerous accordingly.
Yet if we allow the idealists to pass sentence, what shall become of our treasures in "Kubla Khan," or "Ueber allen Gipfeln," or "La Nuit de Decembre"? The results of such a judgment day would be even more appalling to the true lover of poetry.
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