ested by the beautiful work of ancient art once included among
the Townley Marbles, and now in the British Museum.']

XIII. THE RIVER DUDDON: A SERIES OF SONNETS.

317. _Introduction_.

The River Duddon rises upon Wrynose Fell, on the confines of
Westmoreland, Cumberland, and Lancashire: and, having served as a
boundary to the two last counties for the space of about twenty-five
miles, enters the Irish Sea, between the Isle of Walney and the Lordship
of Millum.

318. '_The River Duddon_.'

A Poet, whose works are not yet known as they deserve to be, thus enters
upon his description of the 'Ruins of Rome:'

'The rising Sun
Flames on the ruins in the purer air
Towering aloft;'

and ends thus--

'The setting sun displays
His visible great round, between yon towers,
As through two shady cliffs.'

Mr. Crowe, in his excellent loco-descriptive Poem, 'Lewesdon Hill,' is
still more expeditious, finishing the whole on a May-morning, before
breakfast.

'Tomorrow for severer thought, but now
To breakfast, and keep festival to-day.'

No one believes, or is desired to believe, that those Poems were
actually composed within such limits of time; nor was there any reason
why a prose statement should acquaint the Reader with the plain fact, to
the disturbance of poetic credibility. But, in the present case, I am
compelled to mention, that the above series of Sonnets was the growth of
many years;--the one which stands the 14th was the first produced; and
others were added upon occasional visits to the Stream, or as
recollections of the scenes upon its banks awakened a wish to describe
them. In this manner I had proceeded insensibly, without perceiving that
I was trespassing upon ground pre-occupied, at least as far as intention
went, by Mr. Coleridge; who, more than twenty years ago, used to speak
of writing a rural Poem, to be entitled 'The Brook,' of which he has
given a sketch in a recent publication. But a particular subject cannot,
I think, much interfere with a general one; and I have been further
kept from encroaching upon any right Mr. C. may still wish to exercise,
by the restriction which the frame of the Sonnet imposed upon me,
narrowing unavoidably the range of thought, and precluding, though not
without its advantages, many graces to which a freer movement of verse
would naturally have led.

May I not venture, then, to hope, that, instead of b