e
Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, 'I wish you a good
morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,' into
two blank-verse heroics:--

To you a good morning, good Sir! I wish.
You, Sir! I thank: to you the same wish I.

In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have
thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this
would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an
approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system
guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted
from _The Sailor's Mother_, I can recollect but one instance:
viz. a short passage of four or five lines in _The Brothers_,
that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with
unclouded eye.--'James, pointing to its summit, over which
they had all purposed to return together, informed them that
he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades
passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find
him at the appointed place, _a circumstance of which they
took no heed_: but one of them, going by chance into the
house, which at this time was James's house, learnt _there_,
that nobody had seen him all that day.' The only change which
has been made is in the position of the little word _there_
in two instances, the position in the original being clearly
such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other
words printed in _italics_ were so marked because, though
good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of
common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or
in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general
would have said, 'but that was a circumstance they paid no
attention to, or took no notice of;' and the language is, on
the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator's
being the _Vicar_. Yet if any ear _could_ suspect, that these
sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words
alone could the suspicion have been grounded.

The answer or objection in the preface to the anticipated remark 'that
metre paves the way to other distinctions', is contained in the
following words. 'The distinction of rhyme and metre is voluntary and
uniform, and not, like that produced by (what is called) poetic
diction, arbitrary, and subject to infinite caprices, upon which no
calculation whatever can be made