BARTRAM'S INFLUENCE ON LITERATURE 145 



such as the squirrel, the lion, the lark, are not necessarily 

 confined to Bartram's region, although even they may have 

 suggested themselves by a reading of the Travels. 



The landscape generally is reminiscent of Bartram. " Mid- 

 night on the Euphrates," with " cedars, palms, pines " (I, 286), 

 is again suspiciously like Bartram's night-piece on the Altamaha. 

 The description that follows changes the suspicion into a cer- 

 tainty, for here we get the " ragged rock " of a cavern over- 

 looking the Euphrates, " the moon rising on the horizon " (cf. 

 Bartram's " the moon majestically rising in the east," p. 50, and 

 " the moon about an hour above the horizon," p. 51) ; and the 

 immense gulph with the alligators (I, 286) . The " immense 

 meadow so surrounded as to be inaccessible " is a replica of the 

 " extensive Alachua savanna . . . encircled with high-sloping 

 hills " (p. 187). " For the torrent that roareth far off hath a 

 voice " is another echo of Bartram's storms and recalls Cole- 

 ridge's entry, from Bartram, into the Note Book: " the distant 

 thunder sounds heavily — the crocodiles answer it like an 

 echo— " ^* 



" Kubla Khan " owes to Bartram a great deal of its imagery. 

 The dream of the poem was stimulated by Purchas, whom Cole- 

 ridge had been reading just before he fell asleep, but, as Pro- 

 fessor Lowes has remarked, " there were sufficient links between 

 the images from Purchas which were sinking into the Well and 

 the images from Bartram which were already there. And they 

 did coalesce." ^'^ The background of the poem, Coleridge's " sav- 

 age place," with its " gardens bright with sinuous rills " and its 

 " forests ancient as the hills. Enfolding sunny spots of green- 

 ery," unmistakably came out of Bartram. In the Note Book 

 Coleridge had entered: 



— some wilderness-plot, green and fountainous and unviolated by Man,*^ 



and here we have this "' wilderness-plot " memorandum worked 

 into a poem. That the memorandum was a result of the reading 

 of Bartram is quite certain. It appears between two entries that 

 are transcripts of Bartram's crocodiles or alligators {Travels, 

 127-30). Then follow entries from subsequent pages of Bar- 



^* Archiv, p. 359. *" Xanadu, p. 366. " Archiv, p. 359. 



