* * * * *
“Oh! if billows and pillows and hours and flowers,
And all the brave rhymes of an elder day,
Could be furled together this genial weather,
And carted, or carried, on wafts away,
Nor ever again trotted out—ay me!
How much fewer volumes of verse there’d be!”
Miss Ingelow’s most pretentious poem, next to “Divided,” is the “Letter L.” It has all her characteristic faults, intensified by a curious jog-trot metre:
“We sat on grassy slopes that meet
With sudden dip the level strand;