Nevertheless, "fear" was with him "a cherished visitant," and he would rather have endured far worse terrors than have never entertained a belief in fairy-land.
Over and over again in his poems does he return to the delights of those days of unquestioning faith, perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in the lines in the "Shepherd's Calendar," beginning—
"Oh ! spirit of the days gone by,
Sweet childhood's fearful ecstacy !"
How his thoughts and feelings were now bursting every day into life he has himself told us, with much delicacy and power, in his " Dawnings of Genius." It is evidently of himself, when he writes—
"Thus pausing wild on all he saunters by,
He feels enraptured though he knows not why;
And hums and mutters o'er his joys in vain,
And dwells on something which he can't explain.
The bursts of thought with which his soul's perplexed
Are bred one moment, and are gone the next."
Now and then he got a book which opened up the outer world to him; as, speaking of himself under the name of the "Village Minstrel," he says —
"And oft with books spare hours he would beguile,
And blunder oft with joy round Crusoe's lonely isle."
To a youth with so lively an imagination, the sudden apparition of a fair young girl sitting on a stile, weaving a garland, was enough to alter the whole complexion of his life.
There are not many ballads in the English language which, for light and gracefulness, can match the song in which this young peasant has expressed the burst of feeling which now carried away his heart—
"I love thee, sweet Mary, but love thee in fear;
Were I but the morning breeze, healthy and airy,
As thou goest a-walking I'd breathe in thine ear,
And whisper and sigh how I love thee, my Mary!
I would steal a kiss, but I dare not presume;
Wert thou but a rose in thy garden, sweet fairy.
And I a bold bee for to rifle its bloom,
A whole summer's day would I kiss thee, my Mary!
