"
But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and to his dying day he
could never quite shake off that habit of over-minute detail which
renders the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious, and sometimes
so distasteful.[340] "Simon Lee," after his latest revision, still
contains verses like these:--
"And he is lean and he is sick;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
His legs are thin and dry;
* * * * *
"Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell,"--
which are not only prose, but _bad_ prose, and moreover guilty of the
same fault for which Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous parody on
the ballad-style,--that their "_matter_ is contemptible." The
sonorousness of conviction with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
utterance to commonplaces of thought and trivialities of sentiment has a
ludicrous effect on the profane and even on the faithful in unguarded
moments. We are reminded of a passage in the "Excursion":--
"List! I heard
From yon huge breast of rock _a solemn bleat,
Sent forth as if it were the mountain's voice_."
In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with Lamb began, and was
thenceforward never interrupted.
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