It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed:
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
At the sorrow of my sweet pipings."

Why is it that he is equal to the highest office of poetry in
these sad 'cris de coeur' rather than anywhere else? There is
one poem-- perhaps his greatest poem--which may suggest the
answer. In the 'Sensitive Plant' (1820) a garden is first
described on which are lavished all his powers of weaving an
imaginary landscape out of flowers and light and odour. All
the flowers rejoice in one another's love and beauty except the
Sensitive Plant,

"For the Sensitive Plant has no bright flower;
Radiance and odour are not its dower;
It loves, even like Love, its deep heart is full,
It desires what it has not, the beautiful."

Now there was "a power in this sweet place, an Eve in this
Eden." "A Lady, the wonder of her kind," tended the flowers
from earliest spring, through the summer, "and, ere the first
leaf looked brown, she died!" The last part of the poem, a
pendant to the first, is full of the horrors of corruption and
decay when the power of good has vanished and the power of evil
is triumphant. Cruel frost comes, and snow,

"And a northern whirlwind, wandering about
Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out,
Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff,