But Wordsworth held stoutly, in the main, to his own experience, his own impressions; and he did this even to the injury of his descriptions. He was never, for instance, in sailor's phrase, "off soundings"; he never saw the mid-ocean; and consequently, when he described Leonard, in the first edition of "The Brothers," as sailing in mid-ocean, he says that he gazed upon "the broad green wave and sparkling foam." But he found out his mistake at last; he was fond of reading voyages and travels, and he seems to have become convinced finally, perhaps by the testimony of his sailor brother, that the deep sea was really blue and not green; that the common epithet was the true one; for he corrected the line to read "the broad blue wave."

Let us now examine some of those curiously prosaic passages which Wordsworth strove faithfully to convert into poetry, and strove with various success. And first, those famous arithmetical passages in "The Thorn," one of which stands to-day as it stood in the "Lyrical Ballads." We still read there, indeed, of

A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in height,

the precise altitude that Wordsworth gave it in 1798; not an inch to the critics, he seems to have said. But these other peccant lines in the preceding stanza he recast, and in a way that is curious to follow:

And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy Pond Of water never dry: I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Of these lines Crabb Robinson said to Wordsworth that "he dared not read them aloud in company." "They ought to be liked," rejoined the poet. Well, we may not like them; but they are interesting, for they present a really instructive specimen of bad art. Clearly enough, here is a poet in difficulties. The "little muddy pond" was not a pond in nature, but a pool; and a pool it would have been in verse, but for the particular exigency—the necessity of rhyming with the word beyond. Note now the honesty of our poet. For rhyme's sake he has temporarily sacrificed accuracy; he has called a pool a pond; but to show what the piece of water actually was, that actually it was a pool, though the exigencies of rhyme had forced him to call it provisionally by another name, he goes on to give us its accurate measurement, not only from "side to side," but from end to end as well. "'Tis three feet long and two feet wide," he tells us; and now his northern conscience is satisfied; he seems to say, "I was unfortunately compelled to use the wrong word in this passage, but I make amends at once; these are the precise dimensions of the object, and you can give it the right name yourself." This devotion to the topographical truth of the matter was abated, however, in later editions, perhaps by the derision of the critics. Wordsworth rewrote the passage, one would say, to please the graces rather than the mathematical verities; and the lines now read thus:

You see a little muddy pond Of water, never dry, Though but of compass small, and bare To thirsty suns and parching air.

Another considerable improvement was made, a little further on, in the same poem. These are the lines as they ran in the "Lyrical Ballads":

Poor Martha! on that woful day A cruel, cruel fire, they say, Into her bones was sent; It dried her body like a cinder, And almost turned her brain to tinder.

—1798.