her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced,
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail;
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war.

_THE EXPULSION OF THE MONGOLS._

While the descendants of Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, still held the
reins of power in China, there was born in humble life in that empire a
boy upon whose shoulders fortune had laid the task of driving the
foreigners from the soil and restoring to the Chinese their own again.
Tradition says that at his birth the room was several times filled with
a bright light. However that be, the boy proved to be gifted by nature
with a fine presence, lofty views, and an elevated soul, qualities sure
to tell in the troubled times that were at hand. When he was seventeen
years of age the deaths of his father and mother left him a penniless
orphan, so destitute of means that he felt obliged to take the vows of a
priest and enter the monastery of Hoangkiose. But the country was now in
disorder, rebels were in the field against the Mongol rule, and the
patriotic and active-minded boy could not long endure the passive life
of a bonze. Leaving the monastery, he entered the service of one of the
rebel leaders as a private soldier, and quickly showed such enterprise
and daring that his chief not only made him an officer in his force but
gave him his daughter in marriage.

The time was ripe for soldiers of fortune. The mantle of Kublai had not
fallen on the shoulders of any of his successors, who proved weak and
degenerate monarchs, losing the firm hold which the great conqueror had
kept upon the realm. It was in the year 1345 that Choo Yuen Chang, to
give the young soldier his full name, joined the rebel band. Chunti, one
of the weakest of the Mongol monarchs, was now upon the throne, and on
every side it was evident that the empire of Kublai was in danger of
falling to pieces under this incapable ruler. Fortune had brou