Wordsworth;—our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gift and promise;—in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have:
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple ballad-form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler form, as grand as the
of Ruth; as the
of Michael. In this way, by the occurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style.
Wi’ their fans into their hand,
Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spence
Come sailing to the land.
Wi’ their gold combs in their hair,
Waiting for their ain dear lords,
For they’ll see them nae mair.
But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again,—is indeed, in itself, all in all,—one must not infer its effectiveness when its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative.
