Davies

'Still as a slave before his lord, The ocean hath no blast; His great bright eye most silently Up to the moon is cast--

If he may know which way to go; For she guides him smooth or grim. See, brother, see! how graciously She looketh down on him.'

COLERIDGE.

These extracts show how both Wordsworth and Coleridge assimilated past literary products, and how they glorified them by reproduction. There was little, however, in the poetic imagery of previous centuries that Wordsworth reproduced. His imagination worked in a sphere of its own, free from the trammels of precedent; and he was more original than any other nineteenth century poet in his use of symbol and metaphor. The poem 'To Joanna' was probably composed on August 22, 1800, as the following occurs in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal under that date:

"William was composing all the morning ... W. read us the poem of Joanna, beside the Rothay, by the roadside."

Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth in January 1801, of

"these continuous echoes in the story of 'Joanna's laugh,' when the mountains and all the scenery seem absolutely alive."

Ed.

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