Teacher: He doesn’t tell you whether he expects you to believe it or not; but at any rate, there is a fineness of feeling toward the country people that makes him respect the country superstition.
Pupil: I think she must have been lost, because if she hadn’t, she might have come back to her mother and father.
Teacher: Of course, your imagination there is piecing it out; Wordsworth doesn’t tell you out and out that she was drowned.
Pupil: I think he does; he says her footsteps stopped in the middle of the plank, and something must have happened there.
Teacher: The actual drowning was not described; you cannot help feeling that in the old ballads they would have given you a full description, like Sir Patrick Spence; the ballad ends how?
Pupil: Wordsworth was not trying to imitate the old ballads, was he?
Teacher: No; it is a good deal further away from the old ballads than the others we have had; it is a more imaginative poem, more beauty of phrasing and thought. Any other questions or comments about Lucy Gray?
Pupil: I like this verse:—
“They follow’d from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,