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Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a pleasure-dome so alluring to mere human nature-especially the English variety of it as was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat.
It is easy to understand that men find it a weary task to read in sight of the beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John's. When Kubla Khan "a stately pleasure-dome decreed," he did not mean to settle students there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and Latin prose compositions.
He obeyed at once, and I went on through the village. I wanted just to pass the gate, and look up the road towards Oldcastle Hall. I thought to see nothing but the empty road between the leafless trees, lying there like a dead stream that would not bear me on to the "sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" that lay beyond.
It is this fable of the underground course of Alpheus that Coleridge alludes to in his poem of "Kubla Khan": "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man, Down to a sunless sea."
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 Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree, Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.
They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over two lines from "Kubla Khan": "It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!" In the great glittering cavern with the dark shut out she took a seat on a wooded bench and the evening's oppression lifted.
I crave no marble pleasure-dome, No forks with golden prong; Like HORACE, in a frugal home I'd gladly rub along, Contented with the humblest cot Or shack or hut, if it had got A name like Billabong, Or, better still, like Beeyah-byyah-bunniga-nelliga-jong.
To avoid the more traveled thoroughfare, while the evening was still early, it had been arranged that she should at first take a less direct but less frequented road. This was a famous pleasure-drive from San Francisco, a graveled and sanded stretch of eight miles to the sea, and an ultimate "cocktail," in a "stately pleasure-dome decreed" among the surf and rocks of the Pacific shore.
I took out a stool to make myself more comfortable, and put my feet upon it; I patched up an old parasol, and held it over me like a Chinese pleasure-dome. But all would not do. As I sat smoking and speculating, my legs seemed to stretch to twice their size from weariness, and my nose lengthened visibly as I looked down at it for hours.
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