Mark the Chaucerian freshness of the opening stanzas of "The Witch's Daughter":—
"It was the pleasant harvest time,
When cellar-bins are closely stowed,
And garrets bend beneath their load,
And the old swallow-haunted barns—
Brown-gabled, long, and full of seams
Through which the moted sunlight streams.
And winds blow freshly in, to shake
The red plumes of the roosted cocks,
And the loose hay-mow's scented locks—
Are filled with summer's ripened stores,
Its odorous grass and barley sheaves,
From their low scaffolds to their eaves."
A companion ballad to "The Witch's Daughter" is "The Witch of Wenham," a poem almost equal to it in merit, and like it ending happily. These ballads do not quite attain the almost supernatural simplicity of Wordsworth's "Lucy Gray" and "We are Seven"; but they possess an equal interest, excited by the same poetical qualities. "Telling the Bees," however, seems to the writer as purely Wordsworthian as anything Wordsworth ever wrote:—
"Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence!
Mistress Mary is dead and gone!"
How the tears spring to the eyes in reading this immortal little poem! The bee-hives ranged in the garden, the sun "tangling his wings of fire in the trees," the dog whining low, the old man "with his cane to his chin,"—we all know the scene: its every feature appeals to our sympathies and associations.