So does the Poet’s power of expressing his grief alternate: at times he is too full in heart to find utterance; he “brims with sorrow”—but after awhile, as when “the wave again is vocal in its wooded” banks,
“My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.”
XX.
He knows the “lesser grief” that can be told, also the “deeper anguish which cannot be spoken:” his spirits are thus variably affected.
In his lighter mood, he laments as servants mourn for a good master who has died:
“It will be hard, they say, to find
Another service such as this.”
But he is also visited by a sense of deeper deprivation, such as children feel when they lose a father, and
“see the vacant chair, and think,
How good! how kind! and he is gone.”
XXI.