The stars are forth, the moon above the tops 261 270 I learn'd the language of another world. 286 And twines its roots with the imperial hearths, Grovel on earth in indistinct decay, ๆ Such names at present cut a convict figure, The very Botany Bay' in moral geography; Their loyal treason, renegado vigour, Are good manure for their more bare biography. Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, bigger is 845 Than any since the birthday of typography; A clumsy, frowzy poem, call'd the "Excursion" Writ in a manner which is my aversion. 1 The equal rule of all. Southey and Coleridge, when young men, planned to found a Utopian society on the banks of the Susquehanna. They called it Pantisocracy, After ardently advocating Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, in his youth, Wordsworth in later life became more conservative and even accepted a post under the government. 3 An allusion to an early poem of Wordsworth's on Peter Bell, a pedlar. 4 The Missos Fricker of Bath. The well known convict colony in New South Wales. Joanna Southcote was a visionary, born in Devon about 1750, who prophesied that she would give birth to a second Shiloh, or Prince of Peace, on Oct. 19th, 1814. Instead, she fell into a trance and died in the same year. 8 The celebrated pine forest called La Pineta, the most venerable forest in Italy. Boccaccio chose this forest for the scene of a ghastly story, Nostalgia degli Onesti, in which the mounted spectre of a knight pursues with dogs the ghostly form of a woman who in life repelled his love with scorn. Dryden used the legend in his poem of Theodore and Honoria. |