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I learn'd the language of another world.
I do remember me, that in my youth,
When I was wandering,-upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum's wall,
Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome:
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the star
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watch-dog bay'd beyond the Tiber; and 275
More near from out the Cæsars' palace came
The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly,
Of distant sentinels the fitful song
Begun and died upon the gentle wind.
Some cypresses beyond the time worn breach
Appear'd to skirt the horizon, yet they stood 281
Within a bowshot-Where the Cæsars dwelt,
And dwell the tuneless birds of night, amidst
A grove which springs through levell'd battle-
ments,

Such names at present cut a convict figure, The very Botany Bay5 in moral geography; Their loyal treason, renegado vigour,

Are good manure for their more bare biography.

Wordsworth's last quarto, by the way, is bigger

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Than any since the birthday of typography; A clumsy, frowzy poem, call'd the "Excursion" Writ in a manner which is my aversion.

1 The equal rule of all. Southey and Coleridge, when young men, planned to found a Utopian society on the banks of the Susquehanna. They called it Pantisocracy,

After ardently advocating Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, in his youth, Wordsworth in later life became more conservative and even accepted a post under the government.

3 An allusion to an early poem of Wordsworth's on Peter Bell, a pedlar.

4 The Misses Fricker of Bath.

The well known convict colony in New South Wales. • Published in 1814.

7 Joanna Southcote was a visionary, born in Devon about 1750, who prophesied that she would give birth to a second Shiloh, or Prince of Peace, on Oct. 19th, 1814. Instead, she fell into a trance and died in the same year. 8 The celebrated pine forest called La Pineta, the most venerable forest in Italy.

Boccaccio chose this forest for the scene of a ghastly story, Nostalgia degli Onesti, in which the mounted spectre of a knight pursues with dogs the ghostly form of a woman who in life repelled his love with scorn. Dryden used the legend in his poem of Theodore and Honoria.