s embodied in the fragment,
"Kubla Khan," the glamour of which depends chiefly on the
mystical appeal of subterranean waters. We are transported to
where

"Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea."

These three lines make a deeper impression than any others in
the poem, and form its main theme.

Nor is the feeling of the supernatural unrecognised. Spirits are
near with prophetic promptings. From a deep chasm the sacred
river throws up a mighty fountain, and for a short space
wanders through wood and dale, only to plunge again into its
measureless caverns, and sink in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

"And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war."

Thus when Coleridge's imagination was set free, the mode of
feeling declared itself which had persisted down the ages to the
present. The primitive experience is there in its essentials,
enriched by the aesthetic and intellectual gains of the
intervening centuries. Doubtless there is a living idea, or rather
a group of living ideas, behind the phenomena of subterranean
waters.

Wordsworth has described a more personal experience which
chimes in with all that has been said.

"Through a rift
Not distant from the shore on which we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place--
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens."

If the modern poet could be thus affected, how much more the
primitive man who looked down on water falling into chasms,
or rushing through their depths. It was natural that such
experiences should find expression in his systems of
mythology. The general form they assume is that of springs and
rivers in the underworld, the best known of which appear in the
Graeco-Roman conceptions of Hades. Homer makes Circe
direct Odysseus thus. He is to beach his ship by deep-eddying
Oceanus, in the gloomy Cimmerian land. "But go thyself
to the dank house of Hades. Thereby into Acheron flow
Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus, a branch of the water of the Styx,
and there is a rock and the meeting of the two roaring waters."

Such were the materials which, with many additions and
modifications, developed into the Hades of Virgil's sixth
AEneid, with its lakes, and swamps and dismal streams. The
subterranean wate