148 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



The ebullition is astonishing, and continual, though its greatest force 

 or fury intermits, regularly, for the space of thirty seconds of time . . . 

 the ebullition is perpendicular upwards, from a vast ragged orifice 

 through a bed of rodcs . . . throwing up small particles or pieces of 

 white shells, which subside with the waters, at the moment of inter- 

 mission. ... (p. 231). 



The influence of Bartram on Coleridge was even greater than 

 the preceding pages have indicated it to have been. One must 

 repeat the words of an anonymous reviewer of Van Doren's 

 Bartram: " Good water is left in the well, and indeed Coleridge 

 took more than even the industry of Professor Lowes in his 

 Xanadu has discovered." *^ Even more, one must add, than this 

 summary has disclosed. Coleridge's interest in Bartram's Travels 

 continued throughout his life. Twenty years after he had 

 written " The Ancient Mariner," " Kubia Khan," and the other 

 poems in which Bartram's influence has been traced, or to be 

 precise, in 1818, Coleridge purchased a copy of the Travels.^^ 

 Bartram came into his mind when, in the Biographia Literaria, 

 he wished to describe Wordsworth, of whom he wrote: 



The following analogy will, I am apprehensive, appear dim and 

 fantastic, but in reading Bartram's Travels I could not help transcribing 

 the following lines as a sort of allegory, or connected simile and meta- 

 phor of Wordsworth's intellect and genius. "" The soil is a deep, rich, 

 dark mould, on a deep stratum of tenacious clay ; and that on a founda- 

 tion of rocks, which often break through both strata, lifting their backs 

 above the surface. The trees which chiefly grow here are the gigantic 

 black oak; magnolia magni-floria; fraximus excelsior; platane; and a 

 few stately tulip trees." *^ 



"The Saturday Review of Literature, April 21, 1928. 



^^ Poems, I, 460; Xanadu, p. 453. 



*^ II, 128-129. Ed. Shawcross. Coleridge evidently quoted from memory. The 

 passage in Bartram's Travels reads: "The soil is a deep, rich, dark mould, on 

 a deep stratum of reddish brown tenacious clay, and that on a foundation of 

 rocks which often break through both strata, lifting their backs above the sur- 

 face. The forest trees are chiefly of the deciduous order, as Quercus tinctoria, 

 . . . Magnolia acuminata, Liriodendron, Platanus, Fraxinus excelsior . . ." 

 (p. 36). " Magnolia magni-floria " is, as Professor Lowes has observed {Xanadu, 

 p. 453), a faulty recollection of the magnolia grandiflora, mentioned by Bartram 

 on pp. 29, 73, 169- And, it should be added, so are the names of the other 

 trees mentioned by Coleridge, unless, to add another possibility, they may be 



