Or all that this earth can afford.

But the sound of the church-going bell

These valleys and rocks never heard,

Ne’er sighed at the sound of a knell,

Or smiled when a sabbath appeared.

[38]

Ye winds, that have made me your sport,

Convey to this desolate shore

Some cordial endearing report

Of a land I must visit no more.

My Friends, do they now and then send

A wish or a thought after me?

O tell me I yet have a friend,

Though a friend I am never to see.

This passage is quoted as an instance of three different styles of composition. The first four lines are poorly expressed; some Critics would call the language prosaic; the fact is, it would be bad prose, so bad, that it is scarcely worse in metre. The epithet ‘church-going’ applied to a bell, and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which Poets have introduced into their language, till they and their Readers take them as matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as objects of admiration. The two lines ‘Ne’er sighed at the sound’, &c., are, in my opinion, an instance of the language of passion wrested from its proper use, and, from the mere circumstance of the composition being in metre, applied upon an occasion that does not justify such violent expressions; and I should condemn the passage, though perhaps few Readers will agree with me, as vicious poetic diction. The last stanza is throughout admirably expressed: it would be equally good whether in prose or verse, except that the Reader has an 

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