No mortal man could have breathed to that cadence without long intervals of relaxation. The repetition would have been fatal to the lungs. No doubt there was much healthy exercise taken in the meanwhile. He should forget his rhyme and tell his story, or forget his story and breathe himself. In Shakespeare and elsewhere the climax may be somewhere along the line which runs as varied and meandering as a country road; but in Lydgate it is nowhere but in the rhyme. The couplets slope headlong to their confluence.
March 31, 1852. Intended to get up early this morning and commence a series of spring walks, but clouds and drowsiness prevented. Early, however, I saw the clouds in the west, for my window looks that way, suffused with rosy light, but that flattery is all forgotten now. How can one help being an early riser and walker in that season when the birds begin to twitter and sing in the morning.
The expedition in search of Sir John Franklin, in 1850, landed at Cape Riley, on the north side of Lancaster Sound, and one vessel brought off relics of Franklin, viz., "five pieces of beef, mutton, and pork bones, together with a bit of rope, a small rag of canvas, and a chip of wood cut by an axe." Richardson says, "From a careful examination of the beef bones, I came
