perhaps (though that would have lent itself less gracefully to his poem
of farewell to his Clevedon cottage) his increasing sense of the
necessity of supplementing the ambrosia of love with the bread and
cheese of mortals, compelled him to re-enter the world. No wonder he
should have delayed to do so, for it is as easy to perceive in his
poems that these were days of unclouded happiness as it is melancholy
to reflect by how few others like them his life was destined to be
brightened. The _Aeolian Harp_ has no more than the moderate
merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his
earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's
after-life of disappointment and disillusion--estrangement from the
"beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and
disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so
joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was
preparing for such lines as

"And tranquil muse upon tranquillity."

One cannot in fact refrain from mentally comparing the _'olian
Harp_ of 1795 with the _Dejection_ of 1803, and no one who has
thoroughly felt the spirit of both poems can make that comparison
without emotion. The former piece is not, as has been said, in a
literary sense remarkable. With the exception of the one point of
metrical style, to be touched on presently, it has almost no note of
poetic distinction save such as belongs of right to any simple record
of a mood which itself forms the highest poetry of the average man's
life; and one well knows whence came the criticism of that MS. note
inscribed by S. T. C. in a copy of the second edition of his early
poems, "This I think the most perfect poem I ever wrote. Bad may be the
best perhaps." One feels that the annotator might just as well have