Though bedeck’d with emblems fine,
Is our little Caroline.”
Studies of children, in the warm and tender colouring of personal reminiscence, are the chief matter of the book; children do not appreciate the love and insight that makes it poetry; they will not stand still to trace, in these portraits of brothers and sisters, a likeness to the gentle authors. Grown-up persons, acquainted with the family history, understand the little girl’s patience over her broken doll and her studied kindness to “dear little craving selfish John”.
There is a bending-down in many of the poems that only grown-up persons understand; the writers stoop to conquer childish reserve, not at all in the disconcerting manner of Wordsworth, though they sometimes adopt his way of recording the result:
“Lately an Equipage I overtook,
And help’d to lift it o’er a narrow brook.
No horse it had except one boy, who drew
His sister out in it the fields to view.
O happy town-bred girl, in fine chaise going
For the first time to see the green grass growing.