nless he
was aware of circumstances that precluded all but those implicated in the
crime of her death from knowing the precise moment of its occurrence. If
Lucy was the kind of person not obscurely pourtrayed in the poem; if
Wordsworth had murdered her, either by cutting her throat or smothering
her, in concert, perhaps, with his friends Southey and Coleridge; and if
he had thus found himself released from an engagement which had become
irksome to him, or possibly from the threat of an action for breach of
promise, then there is not a syllable in the poem with which he crowns
his crime that is not alive with meaning. On any other supposition to
the general reader it is unintelligible.

We cannot be too guarded in the interpretations we put upon the words of
great poets. Take the young lady who never loved the dear gazelle--and I
don't believe she did; we are apt to think that Moore intended us to see
in this creation of his fancy a sweet, amiable, but most unfortunate
young woman, whereas all he has told us about her points to an exactly
opposite conclusion. In reality, he wished us to see a young lady who
had been an habitual complainer from her earliest childhood; whose plants
had always died as soon as she bought them, while those belonging to her
neighbours had flourished. The inference is obvious, nor can we
reasonably doubt that Moore intended us to draw it; if her plants were
the very first to fade away, she was evidently the very first to neglect
or otherwise maltreat them. She did not give them enough water, or left
the door of her fern-ease open when she was cooking her dinner at the gas
stove, or kept them too near the paraffin oil, or other like folly; and
as for her temper, see what the gazelles did; as long as they did not
know her "well," they could just manage to exist, but when they got to
understand her real character, one after another felt that death was the
only course open to it, and accordingly died rather than live with such a
mistress. True, the young lady herself said the gazelles loved her; but
disagreeable people are apt to think themselves amiable, and in view of
the course invariably taken by the gazelles themselves any one accustomed
to weigh evidence will hold that she was probably mistaken.

I must, however, return to Frost's "Lives of Eminent Christians." I will
leave none of the ambiguity about my words in which Moore and Wordsworth
seem to have delighted. I am very sorry the