"Whether on crystal rocks ye rove Beneath the bosom of the sea, Wandering in many a coral grove, Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry; "How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The languid strings do scarcely move, The sound is forced, the notes are few." Whereabouts in its Elegant Extracts would a generation that strung together sonorous couplets, and compiled them into a book to Enforce the Practice of Virtue, place such a ripple of verse as this?-- "Piping down the valleys wild, Piping songs of pleasant glee, On a cloud I saw a child, And he, laughing, said to me: "'Pipe a song about a lamb!' So I piped with merry cheer. 'Piper, pipe that song again!' So I piped; he wept to hear. "'Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe; Sing thy songs of happy cheer!' So I sang the same again, While he wept with joy to hear. "'Piper, sit thee down and write In a book, that all may read!' So he vanished from my sight. And I plucked a hollow reed, "And I made a rural pen, And I stained the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear." A native of the jungle, leaping into the fine drawing-rooms of Cavendish Square, would hardly create more commotion than such a poem as "The Tiger," charging in among Epistles to the Earl of Dorset, Elegies describing the Sorrow of an Ingenuous Mind, Odes innumerable to Memory, Melancholy, Music, Independence, and all manner of odious themes. "Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Framed thy fearful symmetry? "In what distant deeps or skies Burned that fire within thine eyes? On what wings dared he aspire? What the hand dared seize the fire? "And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? When thy heart began to beat, What dread hand formed thy dread feet? "What the hammer, what the chain, Knit thy strength and forged thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dared thy deadly terrors clasp? "When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did he smile his work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee?" Mrs. Montagu, by virtue of the "moral" in the last line, may possibly have ventured to read the "Chimney-Sweeper" at her annual festival to those swart little people; but we have not space to give the gem a setting here; nor the "Little Black Boy," with its matchless, sweet child-sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems--all written between the ages of eleven and twenty--is without its peculiar, and often its peerless charm.