SYMPATHY OF THE LAUREATE. 35 



and set, damp or dripping, on the heated mantlepiece, we have 

 often watched with curious and interested eye the poor 

 pilferer's gradual restoration, marking how at first languidly, 

 and then with increasing briskness, he busies his handy paws ; 

 now, cat-like, stroking and wiping his head and face and 

 large moveless eyes, then with his hinder limbs performing the 

 like operation on his wings and body. Laugh at us who 

 laugh may, sympathy with the meanest thing in adversity 

 needs no countenance from great names, but if it did, we might 

 shelter our bit of sentiment from the shafts of ridicule under 

 the broad shield of Wordsworth (the great and good) who 

 wrote the lines of our motto, and also the following, part of the 

 same poem on a forlorn fly tempted to his stove in Germany 

 on one of the coldest days of the last century, 1799. After 

 contrasting his own warm comforts, not indeed of a cheerful 

 fireside, but of loving companionship with the shivering and 

 solitary estate of the Ply, he continues 



"Yet God is my witness thou small helpless thing, 



Thy life I would gladly sustain, 



Till summer come back from the south, and with crowds 

 Of thy brethren, a march thou shouldst sound thro' the clouds, 



And back to the forests again. " 



The poet was young when he wrote these lines, but he in 

 whom "the child" was "father to the man," would not 

 disclaim them now that he is old. 



If the fly were endowed with only an atom of human 

 perception and human vanity, nothing could be more natural 



