'The deaw no more will weep _dew_ The primrose's pale cheek to deck: The deaw no more will sleep Nuzzel'd in the lily's neck; Much rather would it be thy tear, And leaue them both to tremble there.' Wordsworth's vision of the 'flashing daffodils' is not finer than this. A merely realistic Poet (as John Clare or Bloomfield) would never have used the glorious singular, 'thy tear,' with its marvellous suggestiveness of the multitudinous dew regarding itself as outweighed in everything by one 'tear' of such eyes. Every stanza gives a text for commentary; and the rapid, crowding questions and replies of the Tears culminate in the splendid homage to the Saviour in the conclusion, touched with a gentle scorn: 'We goe not to seek The darlings of Aurora's bed, The rose's modest cheek, Nor the violet's humble head, Though the feild's eyes too Weepers be, Because they want such teares as we. Much lesse mean to trace The fortune of inferior gemmes, Preferr'd to some proud face, Or pertch't vpon fear'd diadems: _Crown'd heads are toyes. We goe to meet_ A worthy object, our _Lord's feet_.' 'Feet' at highest; mark the humbleness, and the fitness too. Even more truly than of Donne (in Arthur Wilson's Elegy) may it be said of Crashaw, here and elsewhere, thou 'Couldst give both life and sense unto a flower,'--faint prelude of Wordsworth's 'meanest flower.' Dr. Macdonald (in 'Antiphon') is perplexingly unsympathetic, or, if I may dare to say it, wooden, in his criticism on 'The Weeper;' for while he characterises it generally as 'radiant of delicate fancy,' he goes on: 'but surely such tones are not worthy of flitting moth-like about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman! Fantastically beautiful, they but play with her grief. Sorrow herself would put her shoes off her feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene. They make much of her indeed, but they show her little reverence. There is in them, notwithstanding their fervour of amorous words, a coldness, like that which dwells in the ghostly beauty of icicles shining in the moon' (p. 239). Fundamentally blundering is all this: for the Critic ought to have marked how the Poet's 'shoes' are put off his feet in approaching the weeping Magdalene; but that _she_ is approached as far-back in the Past or in a Present wherein her tears have been 'wiped away,' so that the poem is dedicate not so much to The Weeper as to her Tears, as things of beauty and pricelessness. Mary, 'blessed among women,' is remembered all through; and just as with her Divine Son we must 'sorrow' in the vision of His sorrows, we yet have the remembrance that they are all done, 'finished;' and thus we can expatiate on them not with grief so much as joy. The prolongation of 'The Weeper' is no 'moth-like flitting about the holy sorrow of a repentant woman,' but the never-to-be-satisfied