Note 46 — JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Reading edition
How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:
While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.
And in The Italian Itinerant and The Swiss Goatherd we find a thermometer or barometer called
The well-wrought scale Whose sentient tube instructs to time A purpose to a fickle clime.
Still worse in the Eclipse of the Sun, 1821:
High on her speculative tower Stood Science, waiting for the hour When Sol was destined to endure That darkening.
So in The Excursion,
The cold March wind raised in her tender throat Viewless obstructions.