ke improvisation, the impulsively bewitching
cadences, that charm us in our Elizabethan drama and whose last
warble died with Herrick; but Shelley, Tennyson, and Browning have
shown that the simple pathos of their music was not irrecoverable,
even if the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone beyond recall.
We feel this lack in Wordsworth all the more keenly if we compare such
verses as

Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill,

with Goethe's exquisite _Ueber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh_, in which the
lines (as if shaken down by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop
lingeringly one after another like blossoms upon turf.

_The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_ show plainly the
prevailing influence of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and the
mechanism of the verse. They lack altogether the temperance of tone
and judgement in selection which have made the _Traveller_ and the
_Deserted Village_ perhaps the most truly classical poems in the
language. They bear here and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of
the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain blunt realism, but in
the intensity and truth of picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from
which Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the following verses may
suffice as a specimen. After describing the fate of a chamois-hunter
killed by falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the bereaved
wife and son:

Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days,
Start at the reliques of that very thigh
On which so oft he prattled when a boy.

In these poems there is plenty of that 'poetic diction' against which
Wordsworth was to lead the revolt nine years later.

To wet the peak's impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies.

Both of these passages have disappeared from the revised edition, as
well as some curious outbursts of that motiveless despair which Byron
made fashionable not long after. Nor are there wanting touches of
fleshliness which strike us oddly as coming from Wordsworth.

Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the 'sultry ray' of young Desire;
Those lips whose ti