Note 5 — SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

As the ingenious gentleman under the influence of the Tragic Muse contrived to dislocate, ‘I wish you a good morning, Sir! Thank you, Sir, and I wish you the same,’ into two blank-verse heroics:—

In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth’s works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this would be practicable than I have met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed excepting the stanzas already quoted from The Sailor’s Mother, I can recollect but one instance: viz. a short passage of four or five lines in The Brothers, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye.—‘James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, a circumstance of which they took no heed: but one of them, going by chance into the house, which at this time was James’s house, learnt there, that nobody had seen him all that day.’ The only change which has been made is in the position of the little word there in two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connexion by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, ‘but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to, or took no notice of;’ and the language is, on the theory of the preface, justified only by the narrator’s being the Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect, that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.