e be
At Bolton, in the Fields of Wharf
A stately Priory."

And the stately Priory was rear'd,
And Wharf as he moved along,
To Matins joined a mournful voice,
Nor fail'd at Even-song.

And the Lady pray'd in heaviness
That wish'd not for relief;
But slowly did her succour come,
And a patience to her grief.

Oh! there is never sorrow of heart
That shall lack a timely end,
If but to God we turn, and ask
Of him to be our Friend.

The poem of Samuel Rogers, to which Wordsworth refers in the Fenwick
note, is named _The Boy of Egremond_. It begins--

"Say, what remains when Hope is fled?"
She answered, "endless weeping!"

In a letter to Wordsworth in 1815, Charles Lamb wrote thus of _The Force
of Prayer_, "Young Romilly is divine; the reasons of his mother's grief
being remediless. I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering
above the other loves. Shakspeare had done something for the filial in
Cordelia, and, by implication, for the fatherly too, in Lear's
resentment; he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal
heart.... When I first opened upon the just mentioned poem, in a
careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, '_What is good
for a bootless bene?_' To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the
jest-book has it), she answered, 'A shoeless pea.' It was the first joke
she ever made.... I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not
make me feel, both lately and when I read it in MS." (_The Letters of
Charles Lamb_, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i. p. 288.)--ED.

VARIANTS:

[1] 1820.

... from ... 1815.

[2] 1820.

And the Pair ... 1815.

[3] 1850.

This ... 1815.

[4] 1820.

... with ... 1815.

[5] 1820.

Now is there ... 1815.

[6] 1815.

And deep ... 1827.

The text of 1837 returns to that of 1815.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See _The White Doe of Rylstone_.--W. W. 1820.

[B] Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, May 1819, of Rogers--"He has been
re-writing your Poem of the Strid, and publishing it at the end of his
'Human Life.' Tie him up to the cart, hangman, while you are about it."
(_The Lette