Metre in itself is simply a stimulant of the attention, and therefore excites the question: Why is the attention to be thus stimulated? Now the question cannot be answered by the pleasure of the metre itself; for this we have shown to be conditional, and dependent on the appropriateness of the thoughts and expressions, to which the metrical form is superadded. Neither can I conceive any other answer that can be rationally given, short of this: I write in metre, because I am about to use a language different from that of prose. Besides, where the language is not such, how interesting soever the reflections are, that are capable of being drawn by a philosophic mind from the thoughts or incidents of the poem, the metre itself must often become feeble. Take the last three stanzas of THE SAILOR’S MOTHER, for instance. If I could for a moment abstract from the effect produced on the author’s feelings, as a man, by the incident at the time of its real occurrence, I would dare appeal to his own judgment, whether in the metre itself he found a sufficient reason for their being written metrically? And, thus continuing, she said, “I had a Son, who many a day Sailed on the seas; but he is dead; In Denmark he was cast away; And I have travelled far as Hull to see What clothes he might have left, or other property. The Bird and Cage they both were his ’Twas my Son’s Bird; and neat and trim He kept it: many voyages This Singing-bird hath gone with him; When last he sailed he left the Bird behind; As it might be, perhaps, from bodings of his mind. He to a Fellow-lodger’s care Had left it, to be watched and fed, Till he came back again; and there I found it when my Son was dead; And now, God help me for my little wit! I trail it with me, Sir! he took so much delight in it.” If disproportioning the emphasis we read these stanzas so as to make the rhymes perceptible, even tri-syllable rhymes could scarcely produce an equal sense of oddity and strangeness, as we feel here in finding rhymes at all in sentences so exclusively colloquial. I would further ask whether, but for that visionary state, into which the figure of the woman and the susceptibility of his own genius had placed the poet’s imagination,--(a state, which spreads its influence and colouring over all, that co-exists with the exciting cause, and in which “The simplest, and the most familiar things Gain a strange power of spreading awe around them,”) [67] I would ask the poet whether he would not have felt an abrupt downfall in these verses from the preceding stanza? “The ancient spirit is not dead; Old times, thought I, are breathing there; Proud was I that my country bred Such strength, a dignity so fair: She begged an alms, like one in poor estate; I looked at her again, nor did my pride abate.”