And in The Italian Itinerant and The Swiss Goatherd we find a thermometer or barometer called
The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime.
Still worse in the Eclipse of the Sun, 1821:
High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening.
So in The Excursion,
The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions.
[47] Prelude, Book VI.
[48] Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-complacency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of Helen of Kirconnel,—a poem hardly to be matched in any language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly. Compare:
Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succour me!
O, think ye not my heart was sair
When my love dropt down and spake na mair?
Compare this with,—