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," 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!

I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the preceding stanza?

"The ancient spirit is not dead;

Old times, thought I, are breathing there;
Proud was I that my country bred

Such strength, a dignity so fair :

She begged an alms, like one in poor estate;

I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate."

It must not be omitted, and is besides worthy of notice, that those stanzas furnish the only fair instance that I have been able to discover in all Mr. Wordsworth's writings, of an actual adoption, or true imitation, of the real and very language of low and rustic life, freed from provincialisms.

Thirdly, I deduce the position from all the causes elsewhere assigned, which render metre the proper form of poetry, and poetry imperfect and defective without metre. Metre, therefore, having been connected with poetry most often and by a peculiar fitness, whatever else is combined with metre must, though it be not itself essentially poetic, have nevertheless some property in common with poetry, as an intermedium of affinity, a sort (if I may dare borrow a well-known phrase from technical chemistry) of mordant between it and the super-added metre. Now poetry, Mr. Wordsworth truly affirms, does always imply passion; which word must be here understood in its most general sense, as an excited state of the feelings and faculties. And as every passion has its proper pulse, so will it likewise have its characteristic modes of expression. But where there exists that degree of genius and talent which entitles a writer to aim at the honors of a poet, the very act of poetic composition itself is, and is al

While every goodly or familiar form

Had a strange power of spreading terror round me !"*

N. B.-Though Shakspeare has, for his own all-justifying purposes, introduced the Night-Mare with her own foals, yet Mair means a Sister, or perhaps a Hag.

* [Coleridge's Poetical Works, ii., p. 209. Act. iv., sc. 1. Altered thus:

O sleep of horrors! Now run down and stared at

By forms so hideous that they mock remembrance-
Now seeing nothing, &c. S. C.J

lowed to imply and to produce, an unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne, or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from the force and fervor of the describer, as from the reflections, forms, or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark on Mr. Wordsworth's reply to this objection, or rather on his objection to this reply, as already anticipated in his preface.

Fourthly, and as intimately connected with this, if not the same argument in a more general form, I adduce the high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle, that all the parts of an organized whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts. This and the preceding arguments may be strengthened by the reflection, that the composition of a poem is among the imitative arts; and that imitation, as opposed to copying, consists either in the interfusion of the same throughout the radically different, or of the different throughout a base radically the same.

Lastly, I appeal to the practice of the best poets, of all countries and in all ages, as authorizing the opinion (deduced from all the foregoing) that in every import of the word essential, which would not here involve a mere truism, there may be, is, and ought to be, an essential difference between the language of prose and of metrical composition.

In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's Sonnet, the reader's sympathy with his praise or blame of the different parts is taken for granted rather perhaps too easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or compel it by argumentative analysis. In my conception at least, the lines rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first, differ as much and as little from the language of common life, as those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine excellence. Of the five lines thus

honorably distinguished, two of them differ from prose even more widely than the lines which either precede or follow, in the position of the words.

"A different object do these eyes require;

My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine;
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire."

But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of which no man ever doubted ?—videlicet, that there are sentences, which would be equally in their place both in verse and prose. Assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires proof; namely, that there are not passages, which would suit the one and not suit the other. The first line of this sonnet is distinguished from the ordinary language of men by the epithet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the consideration, that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed, and, as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with the common and material attribute of "shining." And, doubtless, this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional description, where no particular attention is demanded for the quality of the thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast to a man's conversation. Should the sportsman exclaim, "Come, boys! the rosy morning calls you up :"—he will be supposed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects this, when he says, "A wet morning shall not confine us to our beds." This then is either a defect in poetry, or it is not. Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from Homer to Milton, or from Eschylus to Shakspeare; and to strike out (in thought I mean) every instance of this kind. If the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him; or if he continued to deem the work improved by their total omission; he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature. Otherwise I should not hesitate to consider him as a man not so much proof against all authority, as dead to it.