Sturdy he seem’d, though he was sad;

And in his arms a lamb he had.

The words here are doubtless such as are current in all ranks of life; and of course not less so in the hamlet and cottage than in the shop, manufactory, college, or palace. But is this the order, in which the rustic would have placed the words? I am grievously deceived, if the following less compact mode of commencing the same tale be not a far more faithful copy. ‘I have been in a many parts, far and near, and I don’t know that I ever saw before a man crying by himself in the public road; a grown man I mean, that was neither sick nor hurt,’ &c., &c. But when I turn to the following stanza in The Thorn:

At all times of the day and night

This wretched woman thither goes,

And she is known to every star,

And every wind that blows:

And there, beside the thorn, she sits,

When the blue day-light’s in the skies:

And when the whirlwind’s on the hill,

Or frosty air is keen and still;

And to herself she cries,

Oh misery! Oh misery!

Oh woe is me! Oh misery!

[59]

and compare this with the language of ordinary men; or with that which I can conceive at all likely to proceed, in real life, from such a narrator, as is supposed in the note to the poem; compare it either in the succession of the images or of the sentences; I am reminded of the sublime prayer and hymn of praise, which Milton, in opposition to an established liturgy, presents as a fair specimen of common extemporary devotion, and such as we might expect to hear from every self-inspired minister of a 

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