Primrose stanza is known to every one; this is not so familiar:

_The dragon's wing, the magic ring,
I shall not covet for my dower.
If I along that lowly way
With sympathetic heart may stray
And with a soul of power_.

Nor this, with its excruciating simplicity, its descriptive accent of
1798:

_I see a blooming Wood-boy there,
And, if I had the power to say
How sorrowful the wanderer is,
Your heart would be as sad as his
Till you had kiss'd his tears away!

Holding a hawthorn branch in hand,
All bright with berries ripe and red;
Into the cavern's mouth he peeps--
Thence back into the moonlight creeps;
What seeks the boy?--the silent dead!_

It is when he wishes to describe how Peter Bell became aware of the
dead body floating under the nose of the patient ass that Wordsworth
loses himself in uncouth similes. Peter thinks it is the moon, then
the reflection of a cloud, then a gallows, a coffin, a shroud, a stone
idol, a ring of fairies, a fiend. Last of all the poet makes the
Potter, who is gazing at the corpse, exclaim:

_Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd--
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damned!_

So deplorable is the waggishness of a person, however gifted, who has
no sense of humour! This simile was too much for the gravity even of
intimate friends like Southey and Lamb, and after the second edition
it disappeared.

THE FANCY

THE FANCY: _A Selection from the Poetical Remains of the late Peter
Corcoran, of Gray's Inn, student at law. With a brief Memoir of his
life. London: printed for Taylor & Hessey, Fleet Street_. 1820.

The themes of the poets run in a very narrow channel. Since the old
heroic times when the Homers and the Gunnlaugs sang of battle with the
sleet of lances hurtling around them, a great calm has settled down
upon Parnassus. Generation after generation pipes the same tune of
love and Nature, of the liberal arts and the illiberal philosophies;
the same imagery, the same metres, meander within the same polite
margins of conventional subject. Ever and anon some one attempts to
break out of the groove. In the eighteenth century they made a valiant
effort to sing of The Art of Preserving Health, and of The Fleece and
of The Sugar-Cane, but the innovators lie stranded, like cumbrous
whales, on the shore of the ocean of Poesy. Flaubert's friend