Indeed, I myself went to the publisher's (Johnson's) as early as 1805 or 1806, and bought up all the remaining copies (which were but six or seven of the Foreign Sketches, and two or three of the English), as presents, and as _future_ curiosities in literature to literary friends whose interest in Wordsworth might assure one of a due value being put upon the poems. Were it not for this extreme scarcity, I am disposed to think that many lines or passages would long ere this have been made familiar to the public ear. Some are delicately, some forcibly picturesque; and the selection of circumstances is occasionally very original and felicitous. In particular, I remember this one, which presents an accident in rural life that must by thousands of repetitions have become intimately known to every dweller in the country, and yet had never before been consciously taken up for a poet's use. After having described the domestic cock as "sweetly ferocious"--a prettiness of phraseology which he borrows from an Italian author--he notices those competitions or defiances which are so often carried on interchangeably between barn-door cocks from great distances:-- "Echoed by faintly answering farms remote." This is the beautiful line in which he has caught and preserved so ordinary an occurrence--one, in fact, of the commonplaces which lend animation and a moral interest to rural life. After his return from this Swiss excursion, Wordsworth took up his parting residence at Cambridge, and prepared for a final adieu to academic pursuits and academic society. It was about this period that the French Revolution broke out; and the reader who would understand its appalling effects--its convulsing, revolutionary effects upon Wordsworth's heart and soul--should consult the history of the Solitary, as given by himself in "The Excursion"; for that picture is undoubtedly a leaf from the personal experience of Wordsworth:-- "From that dejection I was roused--but how?"