about that famous Ode, and being really smitten with some of the
passages in it, he learnt it, and just as they were about to turn
homewards one sultry evening he suddenly began to repeat it, and
declaimed it to the end with much rhetorical power.

'Bravo!' said Madge, 'but, of all Wordsworth's poems, that is the one
for which I believe I care the least.'

Frank's countenance fell.

'Oh, me! I thought it was just what would suit you.'

'No, not particularly. There are some noble lines in it; for example
-


"And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"


But the very title--Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood--is unmeaning to me, and as for the verse which is in
everybody's mouth -


"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;"


and still worse the vision of "that immortal sea," and of the
children who "sport upon the shore," they convey nothing whatever to