Word: kubla
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...ROAD TO XANADU-John Livingston Lowes-Houghton Mifflin ($6). In this book Professor Lowes of Harvard aims "to tell the story, so far as I have charted its course, of two of the most remarkable poems in English, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan.'" His chief guide in this hazardous and admirable journey is a notebook of 90 chaotic pages in which Coleridge was accustomed to scrawl the names of books which he had read or intended to read, ideas which he considered shaping into verse, recipes for ginger-wine and other paraphernalia...
...great plenitude. The grief of Achilles over the body of Patroclus; the death of Socrates; "Hark! Hark! the Lark" and "Full Fathom Five"; "Lycidas"; "To Althea from Prison"; Gulliver and the Lilliputians; Tristram and the Ass; the Pibroch of Donuil Dhu; "The Rime of the Ancient Mari-er" and "Kubla Khan"; Lamb's "Gentle Giantess"; Edward John Trelawny on how they burned Shelley's body; a great deal of Keats; more Tennyson; still more Thackeray and Browning and more Dickens than anyone...
Another valuable and rare item is the 1816 edition of Christabel and Kubla Khan, Coleridge's own works, which contains notes by him, correcting or improving the original text. The "Christabel" has many lines crossed out and others written in manuscript on the margin...
...Xanadu" one reads, "did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree" and lo! immediately "it was a miracle of rare device...
Unfortunately this is not Xanadu nor has there yet appeared any wonder-working Kubla Khan. In twentieth century America all structures, whether material like pleasure domes or intellectual like educational systems must be built slowly and with particular attention to solidity. Thus almost all construction which necessitates broad and deep foundations necessitates also the employing of some temporary shelter in which the builders can work and think until the edifice which they have conceived rise over and around them in its complete and adequate proportions...