Oh! there is never sorrow of heart
That shall lack a timely end,
If but to God we turn, and ask
Of him to be our Friend.
The poem of Samuel Rogers, to which Wordsworth refers in the Fenwick note, is named The Boy of Egremond. It begins—
"Say, what remains when Hope is fled?"
She answered, "endless weeping!"
In a letter to Wordsworth in 1815, Charles Lamb wrote thus of [The Force of Prayer], "Young Romilly is divine; the reasons of his mother's grief being remediless. I never saw parental love carried up so high, towering above the other loves. Shakspeare had done something for the filial in Cordelia, and, by implication, for the fatherly too, in Lear's resentment; he left it for you to explore the depths of the maternal heart.... When I first opened upon the just mentioned poem, in a careless tone, I said to Mary, as if putting a riddle, 'What is good for a bootless bene?' To which, with infinite presence of mind (as the jest-book has it), she answered, 'A shoeless pea.' It was the first joke she ever made.... I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me feel, both lately and when I read it in MS." (The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i. p. 288.)—Ed.
VARIANTS:
[1] 1820.
... from ... 1815.
[2] 1820.
And the Pair ... 1815.