"The sleepings images" Viaggi di W.Bartram (1739-1823)
(fonte citata da J.J.lowes, The road to Xanadu, 1927 )

Nel libro di "Viaggi" di William Bartram (1739-1823) pubblicato nel 1792 si legge:

... in front, just under my feet, was the enchanting and amazing crystal fountain which incessantly threw up from dark rocky caverns below, tons of water every minute, forming a bason, capacious enough for large shallops to ride in, and a creek of four or five feet depth of water and near twenty yards over, which meanders six miles through green meadows, pouring its limpid waters into the great Lake George ... About twenty yards from the upper edge of the bason directly opposite to the mouth or outlet of the creek, is a continual and amazing ebullition where the waters are thrown up in such abundance and amazing force, as to jet and swell up two or three feet above the common surface: white sand and small particles of shells are thrown up with the waters near to the top, ... The ebullition is astonishing and continual, though its greatest force of fury intermits, regularly, for the space of thiry seconds of time: ... when they ... subside with the expanding flood, and gently sink again. 

ed ecco i primi versi del Kubla Khan di Coleridge:

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst, Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

fonti "ispiratrici" del poema di Coleridge citate nel libro di Lowes:
Purchas (Old man of the Mountain)   •   Purchas (Xamdu)   •   Bartram  •   Bruce  •   Rennel