Sometime between October 9 and 14, 1797—let’s call it the second Monday in October—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as he was walking on the coast in southwest England, became ill and stopped to rest at a remote farm. An image had been tugging at his attention, from a seventeenth-century traveler’s tale about China. In this unfamiliar house, in his delirious state, it unfolded in his mind into a beautiful vision, a city on a hill as it were, with a sacred river, a “stately pleasure dome,” and “twice five miles of fertile ground,” all surrounded with a wall and bending to the emperor’s decree.

But as Coleridge went on writing, the pleasure garden fell under a shadow…. read more at 4Columns