36.
The accumulation of tender images in the following lines appears not
less wonderful:--
'Remember you that pleasant day
When, after roving in the woods,
('Twas April then) I came and lay
Beneath those _gummy_ chestnut-buds?
'A water-rat from off the bank
Plunged in the stream. With idle care,
Downlooking through the sedges rank,
I saw your troubled image there.
'If you remember, you had set,
Upon the narrow casement-edge,
A _long green box_ of mignonette
And you were leaning on the ledge.'
The poet's truth to Nature in his 'gummy' chestnut-buds, and to Art in
the 'long green box' of mignonette--and that masterful touch of likening
the first intrusion of love into the virgin bosom of the Miller's
daughter to the plunging of a water-rat into the mill-dam--these are
beauties which, we do not fear to say, equal anything even in Keats.
We pass by several songs, sonnets, and small pieces, all of singular
merit, to arrive at a class, we may call them, of three poems derived
from mythological sources--Oenone, the Hesperides, and the
Lotos-eaters.
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