8vo (228 x 136 mm). Half-title; 4-page publisher's advertisements at end dated Feb. 1816; with final blank leaf. Modern red morocco gilt, sheets uncut. (Some minor mostly marginal spotting and browning, light dampstaining to upper gutter margin of last few leaves.) Provenance: Sir James Dalrymple-Hay, 2nd Baronet (contemporary signature on title-page). 

FIRST EDITION, containing the first printings of three of Coleridge's most celebrated poems.  Coleridge began writing Christabel as early as 1803. Kubla Khan, which Coleridge composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream in 1797, could not be completed according to his original plan; while writing, Coleridge was interrupted by "a person from Porlock," and the interruption caused him to forget the lines.  He would read the poem periodically to the Wordsworths, Lord Byron, and other friends, and in 1816, Byron persuaded him to publish the visionary Kubla Khan and Christabel. Ashley I, p.204; Grolier English 70; Hayward 207; Tinker 693; Wise Coleridge 32.