des of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;
Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
And rising by the moon of passion swayed.

The political tone is also mildened in the revision, as where he
changes 'despotcourts' into 'tyranny'. One of the alterations is
interesting. In the _Evening Walk_ he had originally written

And bids her soldier come her wars to share
Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar.

An erratum at the end directs us to correct the second verse, thus:

Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar.

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for making the owl a bodeful
bird. He had himself done so in the _Evening Walk_, and corrects his
epithets to suit his later judgement, putting 'gladsome' for 'boding',
and replacing

The tremulous sob of the complaining owl

by

The sportive outcry of the mocking owl.

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so much changed in the
revision as to make the dates appended to them a misleading
anachronism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian passage which
already gives us a glimpse of that passion with which he was the first
to irradiate descriptive poetry and which sets him on a level with
Turner.

'Tis storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour:
The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;
Dark is the region as with coming night;
But what a sudden burst of overpowering light!
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
The West that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire.

Wordsworth has made only one change in these verses, and that for the
worse, by substituting 'glorious' (which was already implied in
'glances' and 'fire-clad') for 'wheeling'. In later life he would have
found it hard to forgive the man who should have made cliffs recline
over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as most prophetic in these
poems is their want of continuity, and the purple patches of true
poetry on a texture of unmistakable prose; perhaps we might add the
incongruous clot