That slipped my simple fingers through
While just a girl at school!”
Here was already manifest that defiance of form, never through carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her. The slightest change in the order of words—thus, “While yet at school, a girl”—would have given her a rhyme for this last line; but no; she was intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the change. The other poem further showed, what had already been visible, a rare and delicate sympathy with the life of nature:—
“A bird came down the walk;
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow raw.
“And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,