that for a man's description of his wooing the warmth of feeling which
pervades them is as nearly sexless in character as it is possible to
conceive; and, beautiful as the verses are, one cannot but feel that
they only escape the "namby-pamby" by the breadth of a hair.

As to the wild dream-poem _Kubla Khan_, it is hardly more than a
psychological curiosity, and only that perhaps in respect of the
completeness of its metrical form. For amid its picturesque but vague
imagery there is nothing which might not have presented itself, and the
like of which has not perhaps actually presented itself, to many a
half-awakened brain of far lower imaginative energy during its hours of
full daylight consciousness than that of Coleridge. Nor possibly is it
quite an unknown experience to many of us to have even a fully-written
record, so to speak, of such impressions imprinted instantaneously on
the mind, the conscious composition of whole pages of narrative,
descriptive, or cogitative matter being compressed as it were into a
moment of time. Unfortunately, however, the impression made upon the
ordinary brain is effaced as instantaneously as it is produced; the
abnormal exaltation of the creative and apprehensive power is quite
momentary, being probably indeed confined to the single moment between
sleep and waking; and the mental tablet which a second before was
covered so thickly with the transcripts of ideas and images, all far
more vivid, or imagined to be so, than those of waking life, and all
apprehended with a miraculous simultaneity by the mind, is converted
into a _tabula rasa_ in the twinkling of a half-opened eye. The wonder in
Coleridge's case was that his brain retained the word-impressions
sufficiently long to enable him to commit them, to the extent at least
of some fifty odd lines, to paper, and that, according to his own
belief, this is but a mere fraction of what but for an unlucky
interruption in the work of transcribing he would have been able to