s on the top, but palaces, standing by themselves ...
spacious, sumptuous, and beautifull, where the Princes of the Royall
blood have their abode with their families."

This legend looks backward to Mandeville, with whose account of the
Terrestrial Paradise it has much in common, and forward to Milton, who
used some of its elements in his description of Paradise in the fourth
book of "Paradise Lost." (See Professor Cooper's article in "Modern
Philology," III., 327 ff., from which this is condensed.)

Mr. E.H. Coleridge (the poet's grandson) has recently shown that in the
winter of 1797-8 Coleridge read and made notes from a book, "Travels
through ... the Cherokee Country," by the American botanist William
Bartram. Chapter VII. of Bartram's book contains an account of some
natural wonders in the Cherokee country that almost certainly afforded
part of the imagery of "Kubla Khan." Bartram, says Mr. Coleridge,
"speaks of waters which 'descend by slow degrees through rocky caverns
into the bowels of the earth, whence they are carried by subterraneous
channels into other receptacles and basons.' He travels for several
miles over 'fertile eminences and delightful shady forests.' He is
enchanted by a 'view of a dark sublime grove;' of the grand fountain he
says that the 'ebullition is astonishing and continual, though its
greatest force of fury intermits' (note the word 'intermits') 'regularly
for the space of thirty seconds of time: the ebullition is perpendicular
upward, from a vast rugged orifice through a bed of rock throwing up
small particles of white shells.' He is informed by 'a trader' that when
the Great Sink was forming there was heard 'an inexpressible rushing
noise like a mighty hurricane or thunderstorm,' that 'the earth was
overflowed by torrents of water which came wave after wave rushing down,
attended with a terrific noise and tremor of the earth,' that the
fountain ceased to flow and 'sank into a huge bason of water;' but, as
he saw with his own eyes, 'vast heaps of fragments of rock' (Coleridge
writes 'huge fragments'), 'white chalk, stones, and pebbles had been
thrown up by the original outbursts and forced aside into the lateral
valleys.'"

From these and from other like sources Coleridge's mind was no doubt
stored with suggestions of tropical wonder and loveliness, which fell
together--if his own account of the making of the poem is to be relied
on--into the kaleidoscopic beauty of "Kubla Khan." It is n