Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight, and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble bee
Sings in the bean flower!"
The recurrence of the word "and" in four consecutive lines is perhaps the most noticeable blemish here.
It is at Nether Stowey when Coleridge was five-and-twenty years old that we find the first utterance which seems to treat Nature as the theme and not merely as a subsidiary aid to the expression of certain thoughts. "Frost at Midnight," belonging to 1798, has some fine lines addressed to little Hartley:
"Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing