FIELD-DAYS IN CALIFORNIA 



" In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 



A stately pleasure-dome decree : 

 Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 

 Through caverns measureless to man 

 Down to a sunless sea." 



Scores of times he had repeated the verses to 

 himself during the last day or two (they are 

 worth repeating for their music, though no less 

 a critic than William Hazlitt pronounced the 

 poem "a mixture of raving and driveling"), and 

 now, when he saw the sacred river, its muddiness 

 visible a mile away, the sight gave him an unpleas- 

 ant shock. The river that the opium-eating poet 

 saw could never have been of that complexion. 

 Some such romantic feeling as this was upon 

 him, perhaps, when, happening to turn his head, 

 he beheld close behind him, at the tip of a low, 

 dead tree, the form of a strange bird. "Now, 

 pray, what can you be ? " he exclaimed under his 

 breath ; and in one moment the Canon was a 

 thousand miles off. Some distance back he had 

 heard a musical chorus, suggestive to his ear of 

 a chorus of pine grosbeaks, and then had seen 

 the flock for an instant, as it flew across a clear 

 space among the trees, moving toward the rim 

 of the Canon. And now here was a bird right 

 before him, a finch of some kind, a female, in all 

 probability (if it had only been a male in bright 

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