This book aims to provide a general manual of English Literature for students in colleges and universities and others beyond the highschool age. The first purposes of every such book must be to outline the development of the literature with due regard to national life, and to give appreciative interpretation of the work of the most important authors. I have written the present volume because I have found no other that, to my mind, combines satisfactory accomplishment of these ends with a selection of authors sufficiently limited for clearness and with adequate accuracy and fulness of details, biographical and other | ,' and Part I of 'Christabel.' In 'Kubla Kahn' 'Xanadu' is Coleridge's form for 'Xamdu,' the capital of Kublai Khan in Purchas's Pilgrimage, which Coleridge was reading when he fell into the sleep in which he wrote the poem. Coleridge said (though he is not to be trusted explicitly) that he composed the poem, to a length of over 200 lines, without conscious effort; that on awaking he wrote down what has been preserved; that he was then called out on an errand; and returning after an hour he could recollect only this much. How far do you agree with Swinburne's judgment: 'It is perhaps the most wonderful of all poems. We seem rapt into that paradise revealed to Swedenborg, where music and color and perfume were one, where you could hear the hues and see the harmonies of heaven. For absolute melody and splendor it were hardly rash to call it the first poem in the language. An exquisite instinct married to a subtle science of verse has made it the supreme model of music in our language, unapproachable except by Shelley.' In all the poems consider:
