is assisted by the very state which it counteracts; and how this balance of antagonists became organized into metre (in the usual acceptation of that term), by a supervening act of the will and judgment, consciously, and for the foreseen purpose of pleasure. Assuming these principles, as the data of our argument, we deduce from them two legitimate conditions, which the critic is entitled to expect in every metrical work. First, that, as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural language of excitement. Secondly, that as these elements are formed into metre artificially, by a voluntary act, with the design and for the purpose of blending delight with emotion, so the traces of present volition should throughout the metrical language be proportionably discernible. Now, these two conditions must be reconciled and co-present. There must be not only a partnership, but a union; an interpenetration of passion and of will, of spontaneous impulse and of voluntary purpose. Again, this union can be manifested only in a frequency of forms and figures of speech (originally the offspring of passion, but now the adopted children of power) greater than would be desired or endured, where the emotion is not voluntarily encouraged and kept up for the sake of that pleasure which such emotion, so tempered and mastered by the will, is found capable of communicating. It not only dictates, but of itself tends to produce, a more frequent employment of picturesque and vivifying language than would be natural in any other case, in which there did not exist, as there does in the present, a previous and well understood, though tacit, compact between the poet and his reader, that the latter is entitled to expect, and the former bound to supply this species and degree of pleasurable excitement. We may, in some measure, apply to this union the answer of Polixenes, in the Winter's Tale, to Perdita's neglect of the streaked gilliflowers, because she had heard it said,

"There is an art, which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.

Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art

That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock;

And make conceive a bark of baser kind

By bud of nobler race. This is an art,

Which does mend nature,-change it rather; but
The art itself is nature."

As far as metre

Secondly, I argue from the effects of metre. acts in and for itself, it tends to increase the vivacity and susceptibility both of the general feelings and of the attention. This effect it produces by the continued excitement of surprise, and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight, indeed, to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation, they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. Where, therefore, correspondent food and appropriate matter are not provided for the attention and feelings thus roused, there must needs be a disappointment felt; like that of leaping in the dark from the last step of a staircase, when we had prepared our muscles for a leap of three or four.

The discussion on the powers of metre in the preface is highly ingenious, and touches at all points on truth. But I cannot find any statement of its powers considered abstractly and separately. On the contrary, Mr. Wordsworth seems always to estimate metre by the powers which it exerts during (and, as I think, in consequence of) its combination with other elements of poetry. Thus the previous difficulty is left unanswered, what the elements are with which it must be combined in order to produce its own effects to any pleasurable purpose. Double and tri-syllable rhymes, indeed, form a lower species of wit, and, attended to for their own sake, may become a source of momentary amusement; as, in poor Smart's distich to the Welsh Squire who had promised him a hare:

"Tell me, thou son of great Cadwallader!

Hast sent the hare? or hast thou swallow'd her?”

7 [Act iv., sc. iii. S. C.]

But for any poetic purposes, metre resembles (if the aptness of the simile may excuse its meanness) yeast, worthless or disagreeable by itself, but giving vivacity and spirit to the liquor with which it is proportionally combined.

The reference to THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD by no means satisfies my judgment. We all willingly throw ourselves back for awhile into the feelings of our childhood. This ballad, therefore, we read under such recollections of our own childish feelings, as would equally endear to us poems, which Mr. Wordsworth himself would regard as faulty in the opposite extreme of gaudy and technical ornament. Before the invention of printing, and, in a still greater degree, before the introduction of writing, metre, especially alliterative metre (whether alliterative at the beginning of the words, as in PIERCE PLOUMAN, or at the end, as in rhymes), possessed an independent value as assisting the recollection, and, consequently, the preservation, of any series of truths or incidents. But I am not convinced, by the collation of facts, that THE CHILDREN IN THE WOOD Owes either its preservation or its popularity to its metrical form. Mr. Marshal's repository affords a number of tales in prose inferior in pathos and general merit, some of as old a date, and many as widely popular. Toм HICKATHRIFT, JACK THE GIANT-KILLER, GOODY TWO-SHOES, and LITTLE RED RIDING-HOOD, are formidable rivals. And that they have continued in prose, cannot be fairly explained by the assumption, that the comparative meanness of their thoughts and images precluded even the humblest forms of metre. The scene of GOODY TWO-SHOES in the church is perfectly susceptible of metrical narration; and, among the Davμara Oavμaotórara, even of the present age, I do not recollect a more astonishing image than that of the "whole rookery, that flew out of the giant's beard," scared by the tremendous voice with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic TOM HICKATHRIFT!

If from these we turn to compositions universally, and independently of all early associations, beloved and admired; would

8 [P. 333. S. C.]

THE MARIA, THE MONK, or THE POOR MAN'S Ass of Sterne,' be read with more delight, or have a better chance of immortality, had they, without any change in the diction, been composed in rhyme, than in their present state? If I am not grossly mistaken, the general reply would be in the negative. Nay, I will confess that, in Mr. Wordsworth's own volumes, the ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS, SIMON LEE, ALICE FELL, BEGGARS, and THE SAILOR'S MOTHER,10 notwithstanding the beauties which are to be found in each of them where the poet interposes the music of his own thoughts, would have been more delightful to me in prose, told and managed, as by Mr. Wordsworth they would have been, in a moral essay or pedestrian tour.

Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question-Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now, the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself: for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer, that can be rationally given, short of this-I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. Take the three last stanzas of THE SAILOR'S MOTHER, for instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the author's feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he found a sufficient reason for their being written metrically?

And, thus continuing, she said,
"I had a Son, who many a day
Sailed on the seas; but he is dead;
In Denmark he was cast away;

9 [Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy.

271, 312. S. C.]

Works, ii., pp. 247, 394,

10 [P. W., i., p. 22. v., p. 17. i., p. 13. ii., p. 101. i., p. 182. S. C.]

And I have travelled far as Hull, to see

What clothes he might have left, or other property."1
The Bird and Cage they both were his :"
'Twas my Son's Bird; and neat and trim
He kept it: many voyages

This Singing-bird hath gone with him;
When last he sailed he left the Bird behind;

As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind.

He to a Fellow-lodger's care

Had left it, to be watched and fed,

Till he came back again; and there

I found it when my Son was dead;

And now, God help me for my little wit!

I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it."

If, disproportioning the emphasis, we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet's imagination—(a state which spreads its influence and coloring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which

"The simplest, and the most familiar things

Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,")12

11 [In the edit. of 1840,

"And I have travelled weary miles to see

If aught which he had owned might still remain for me."

The last line of stanza 5 in that edit. stands thus:

"From bodings, as might be, that hung upon his mind."

The end of stanza 6 has been altered thus:

"And pipe its song in safety ;-there

I found it when my Son was dead;

And now, God help me for my little wit!

I bear it with me, Sir;-he took so much delight in it." S. C." 12 Altered from the description of Night-Mair in the REMORSE. "Oh Heaven! 'twas frightful! Now run down and stared at By hideous shapes that cannot be remembered; Now seeing nothing and imagining nothing; But only being afraid-stifled with fear!