To do this is of course impossible, and the lines which I have italicized are mere closet description. We cannot skate across the reflection of a star until we can skate into the end of a rainbow; and the curious thing is that the so-called "poet of nature" should ever have fancied, even for a moment at his desk, that he had ever done it. Clearly, Wordsworth's study was not always out of doors, to use a favorite phrase of his; on the contrary, this passage is so unreal that a critic unacquainted with the personal history of the poet might argue that he had never been on skates--as Coleridge wrote the "Hymn in the Valley of Chamouni" without ever visiting that valley. But Wordsworth seems to have found out that his description was false; for he made a compromise, in the later editions, with the optical law of incidence and reflection; and we now see him attempting merely, but not achieving, the impossible thing: ----Leaving the tumultuous throng To cut across the reflex of a star That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed Upon the glassy plain. But Wordsworth held stoutly, in the main, to his own experience, his own impressions; and he did this even to the injury of his descriptions. He was never, for instance, in sailor's phrase, "off soundings"; he never saw the mid-ocean; and consequently, when he described Leonard, in the first edition of "The Brothers," as sailing in mid-ocean, he says that he gazed upon "the broad green wave and sparkling foam." But he found out his mistake at last; he was fond of reading voyages and travels, and he seems to have become convinced finally, perhaps by the testimony of his sailor brother, that the deep sea was really blue and not green; that the common epithet was the true one; for he corrected the line to read "the broad blue wave." Let us now examine some of those curiously prosaic passages which Wordsworth strove faithfully to convert into poetry, and strove with various success. And first, those famous arithmetical passages in "The Thorn," one of which stands to-day as it stood in the "Lyrical Ballads." We still read there, indeed, of A beauteous heap, a hill of moss, Just half a foot in height, the precise altitude that Wordsworth gave it in 1798; not an inch to the critics, he seems to have said. But these other peccant lines in the preceding stanza he recast, and in a way that is curious to follow: And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a little muddy Pond Of water never dry: I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.