It was that loveliest moment of all the English year, when summer, which has been coquetting for weeks with the enamoured earth, breaking out one day into sunny smiles, and on the next hiding her sweet face in mists and clouds, has issued forth at last in her full beauty. In the irresistible magic of her presence the meadows had become gemmed with flowers; the beeches and elms, and even the tardy old oaks, which are of too ancient a lineage to be beguiled by mere promises, lifted up golden-green canopies to the heavens; the birds--nightingales and larks, and linnets and thrushes--made the copses and hedgerows resonant with joyful music. For three whole days the sky and the river had been penetrated with sunlight. In weather such as this Tom Gregory spent as little time as possible in town. On the particular day which I am trying to recall he found, to his contentment, that there was not much doing, and he gained permission easily from the head clerk of his department to leave earlier than usual. His mother was out when he reached the cottage--at Lady Elton's, the servant said. Proposing to himself to join her there a little later, he ran up to his room, threw off his city dress, put on his flannels and went out into the garden. There was a certain tree at its further end, a weeping-ash with long pendent branches, under whose shadow it was often his pleasure to hide and dream. He would take out a volume of poetry--Shelley and Coleridge were his favourites--and lying on his stomach, with his head propped on his elbows, would read a few stanzas, just, as he would express it, to set himself going. After that, if he had nothing particular to think out, he would give a free rein to his fancy, which would range over heaven and earth with the unbridled, glorious luxuriance of youth. Meantime he would watch the waters as they flowed past his retreat, taking absent note of the procession of boats and the laughing music of young voices, which blended sweetly with the sighing of the wind and the chanting of the birds. This evening, as he remembered later, he had taken out Coleridge. The volume opened of its own accord at that magnificent fragment, 'Kubla Khan.' He read it over twice, with that curious rapture of satisfaction which nothing but the greatest poetry can call out; and then the mystic imagery in its stately setting of miraculously beautiful words set his mind wandering on a wild vision quest of its own. What the vision was, or whether he was bold enough to imagine that _he_ could build That dome in air-- That sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice-- I must not venture to say, lest I should suddenly find myself, 'like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,' floundering in depths whither few will care to follow me.