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 _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_, _The 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 last three 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 judgement, 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;
And I have travelled far as Hull, to see
What clothes he might have left, or other property.

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 w