On which they gazed themselves away.
——
There was a hardness in his cheek,
There was a hardness in his eye,
As if the man had fixed his face,
In many a solitary place,
Against the wind and open sky.
“The Wagoner,” is altogether unworthy of Wordsworth’s genius. It is an attempt of a poet without humor to be gay and jocular, and very dismal gayety it is. But even this poem is not to be dismissed without a reference to its one exquisite passage—that in which he describes the obligation upon him to write it:
Nor is it I who play the part,
But a shy spirit in my heart,