to be governed, it is not
therefore wanting in continuous hold upon the mind, or in unity, which
is effected by the identity of moral interest that places the two
personages upon the same footing in the reader's sympathies. My ramble
over many parts of Salisbury Plain put me, as mentioned in the preface,
upon writing this poem, and left upon my mind imaginative impressions
the force of which I have felt to this day. From that district I
proceeded to Bath, Bristol, and so on to the banks of the Wye; when I
took again to travelling on foot. In remembrance of that part of my
journey, which was in 1793, I began the verses,

'Five years have passed,' &c.

22. _Charles Farish_.

'And hovering, round it often did a raven fly.'

From a short MS. poem read to me when an undergraduate, by my
schoolfellow and friend, Charles Farish, long since deceased. The verses
were by a brother of his, a man of promising genius, who died young.
['Guilt and Sorrow,' st. ix. l. 9.]

23. *_The Forsaken. Poems founded on the Affections_. [XII.]

This was an overflow from the affliction of Margaret, and excluded as
superfluous there; but preserved in the faint hope that it may turn to
account, by restoring a shy lover to some forsaken damsel; my poetry
having been complained of as deficient in interests of this sort, a
charge which the next piece, beginning,

'Lyre! though such power do in thy magic live!'

will scarcely tend to obviate. The natural imagery of these verses was
supplied by frequent, I might say intense, observation of the Rydal
Torrent. What an animating contrast is the ever-changing aspect of that,
and indeed of every one of our mountain brooks, to the monotonous tone
and unmitigated fury of such streams among the Alps as are fed all the
summer long by glaciers and melting snows! A traveller, observing the
exquisite purity of the great rivers, such as the Rhone at Geneva, and
the Reuss at Lucerne, where they issue out of their respective lakes,
might fancy for a moment that some power in Nature produced this
beautiful change, with a view to make amends for those Alpine sullyings
which the waters exhibit near their fountain heads; but, alas! how soon
does that purity depart, before the influx of tributary waters that have
flowed through cultivated plains and the crowded abodes of men.

24. *_The Borderers: a Tragedy_.

Of this dramatic work I have little to say in addition to the short
printed note whi