He seems to us to write a line at random, and then he follows,
not the thought excited by this line, but that suggested by the _rhyme_
with which it concludes. There is hardly a complete couplet enclosing a
complete idea in the whole book. He wanders from one subject to another,
from the association, not of ideas, but of sounds; and the work is
composed of hemistichs which, it is quite evident, have forced
themselves upon the author by the mere force of the catchwords on which
they turn.
'We shall select, not as the most striking instance, but as that least
liable to suspicion, a passage from the opening of the poem;--
"Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils,
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead," &c.
Here it is clear that the word, and not the idea, _moon_, produces the
simple sheep and their shady _boon_, and that "the _dooms_ of the mighty
dead" would never have intruded themselves but for the "fair musk-rose
_blooms_.
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