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Sons of the Bard, my heart still mourns

With sorrow true;

And more would grieve, but that it turns
Trembling to you!

"Through Twilight shades of good and ill
Ye now are panting up life's hill,
And more than," etc.

Stanza ii. was recast, thus:

"Hath Nature strung your nerves to bear
Intemperance with less harm, beware!
But if the Poet's wit ye share,

Like him can speed

The social hour-for tenfold care

There will be need."

Line 2, stanza iii., became, in 1827: "To spare your failings for his sake." Between stanzas iii. and iv. were inserted, from 1827 onwards, the following stanzas:

Far from their noisy haunts retire,
And add your voices to the quire

That sanctify the cottage fire

With service meet;

There seek the genius of your Sire,
His spirit greet;

Or where, 'mid "lonely heights and hows,"
He paid to Nature tuneful vows;
Or wiped his honourable brows

Bedewed with toil,

While reapers strove, or busy ploughs
Upturned the soil;

His judgment with benignant ray

Shall guide, his fancy cheer, your way;

But ne'er to a seductive lay

Let faith be given;

Nor deem that "light which leads astray,
Is light from Heaven."

The phrases in inverted commas are taken respectively from Burns's Epistle to James Smith (1. 53) and The Vision, Duan Second, stanza xviii.

Yarrow Unvisited (page 31).-Composed "soon after" the return from Scotland, September 25,

1803 (Wordsworth to Walter Scott). The Braes of Yarrow-of the many poems of Hamilton of Bangour (d. 1754) perhaps the only one that possesses native force and passion-has furnished one or two phrases here; but the metre is that of the bewitching old ditty, Leader Haughs and Yarrow, 66 ascribed," says Lockhart, "to the last of the minstrels of this district [not the last!] named Burn." Can we doubt that the great Minstrel of the Border recited the charmed verses to William and Dorothy during their ramble over Melrose on September 19, 1803, as he did sixteen years later to Lockhart, standing on a spur of the Eildon hills?—

"Sing Erceldoune and Cowdenknowes,
Where Homes had ance commanding,
And Dry Grange wi' the milk-white ewes,
'Twixt Tweed and Leader standing.
The bird that flees through Redpath trees
And Gledswood banks each morrow,

May chaunt and sing-sweet Leader-baughs
And Bonny Howms of Yarrow.",

Note the classic purity of the style in Wordsworth's

austere but radiant lyric. "Pretty women, it has been said, have more features than beautiful women: i.e. pretty women have a number of attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, whereas a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; she is not an aggregate of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the dividing test of poetry. If you catch yourself admiring its details it is defective; you ought to think of it as a whole which you must remember, something which somehow subdues you while you admire it, which is a possession to you for Take the Yarrow Unvisited of Wordsworth. Instances of barer style may easily be found; instances of colder style-few better instances of pure style. Not a single detail can be spared, yet not one rivets the attention. If indeed we take out the lines:

ever.

'The Swan on still St. Mary's Lake

Float double-Swan and Shadow'

-they have an independent value, but they are not noticed in the poem when we read it through; they fall into place there, and, being in their place, are

not seen. The great subject of the poem-the duty of spiritual frugality, of laying up in the heart stores of meditative joy from which one refrains from drawing all that might be drawn of present delightis the only idea left in the mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the self-denying artist: you think neither of him nor of his style, but you cannot help thinking of you must recallthe exact phrase, the very sentiment he wished." (Adapted from Walter Bagehot's On Pure and Ornate Style in Literature: Literary Studies, 3 vols., Longman.) The text remained virtually unchanged.

Moods of my own Mind (page 37).—In these little poems, be it observed, Wordsworth is "not describing himself as himself; autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a specimen of human nature; he describes a distillation of himself. He takes his most characteristic moods . . . . chooses preponderant feelings of special sorts of men or occasional feelings of men of all sorts. Such selfdescribing poets describe what is in them, but not peculiar to them-what is generic, not what is special and individual" (Bagehot).

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