The life of the poem lies in the instinctive thought of immortality, and in the sense of neighbourhood and close companionship between the quick and the dead. It is the same thought, the same sense, that throws its magical light on the tale of Lucy Gray, and permits those last verses which make the whole thing wonderful, and the common story fine-- Yet some maintain that to this day She is a living child; That you may see sweet Lucy Gray Upon the lonesome wild. O’er rough and smooth, she trips along And never looks behind; And sings a solitary song That whistles in the wind. The poem of ‘We are Seven,’ expressing a conception precious to Wordsworth, yet not expressing it exactly as he would have it expressed, was, after its first publication, subjected to more changes than any composition of its length. Of course the direct address to ‘dear brother Jem’--‘A little child, dear brother Jem’--is removed. Wordsworth only allowed it to stand at first because he relished the joke of hitching in his friend James Tobin’s name, and this gratuitous reference to a good fellow, a bad critic, and the brother of the author of ‘The Honeymoon,’ was promptly suppressed. ‘I sing a song to them,’ is substituted for a line far more effective with the context--‘I sit and sing to them.’ Another line, beautiful with the context--‘And all the summer dry’--yields to the line ‘And when the grass was dry.’ But at one point ‘little Jane’ becomes ‘sister Jane,’ perhaps happily, and, ‘Quick was the little maid’s reply’ gives the desired sense of readiness and certainty better than the line it effaces. It is the old story of careful verbal alterations--some are for the better, some are for the worse. More than one of the graver pastoral poems are missing, naturally enough, to my rare book. I do not find in it that pastoral of ‘Michael,’ which of itself is quite enough, it seems to me, to ensure to its writer a fame which shall last as long as any judges of Literature remain--any judges who, caring for style itself, care supremely for its fit association with the sentiment it is its business to express. ‘Michael’ is intensely realistic: in the best sense it is more realistic than anything of Crabbe’s, and the verse that seems to be halting is but prosaic deliberately. The effect is sought for, and the effect is gained. The pathos is all the greater because the elevation of language is so slight and infrequent. When it occurs, it tells! That poem belongs to the next series of the poet’s works--to the little collection published first, I think, in 1802, and assuming to itself the title of _Lyrical Ballads; Volume the Second_. There had before been no hint of a second, and the first is complete in itself.