136 WILLIAM BARTRAM 



passage quoted from page l4l of Bartram's Travels' we find 

 " the hurricane comes on roaring " and " the heavy thunder 

 keeps the earth in a constant tremor," which latter statement 

 becomes the " sound [that] shook the sails." ^^ Moreover echoes 

 of the very same passage have already been noted in Osorio, a 

 slightly earlier work. 



In a study of " Wordsworth's Sources " -* Professor Lane 

 Cooper incidentally suggested the parallel between a memorable 

 stanza in " The Ancient Mariner ' : 



Sometimes a- dropping from the sky 

 I heard the sky-lark sing; 

 Sometimes all little birds that are, 

 How they seemed to fill the sea and air 

 With their sweet jargoning! (358-62) 



and the following passage in Bartram: 



In the spring of the year the small birds of passage appear very 

 suddenly in Pennsylvania ... at once the woods, the groves, the meads, 

 are filled with their melody as if they dropped down from the skies. 

 The reason or probable cause is their setting off with high and fair 

 winds from southward; for a strong south and south-west wind about 

 the beginning of April never fails bringing millions of these welcome 

 visitors (p. 288). 



That suggestion still stands as a highly plausible one, even 

 though Professor Cooper has seen fit, twenty-five years later, 

 to add a reservation. In a review of The Road to Xanadu, he 

 takes issue with Professor Lowes' s statement that the diction of 

 " The Ancient Mariner " is mainly " determined by the words 

 and phrases taken over from the travel-books," ^^ believing that 

 " Mr. Lowes on the whole underestimates the draft upon other 

 sources." Professor Cooper now cites Gower and The Tempest 



^^ " The sails themselves," remarks Professor Lowes, '" that were so thin and 

 sere, are the transfigured sails of the veritable ship from which the actual 

 albatross was shot: " Our sails,' wrote Captain Shelvocke, "... were now grown 

 so very thin and rotten '." Xanadu, p. 192. The quotation from Shelvocke is 

 from page 432 of Capt. George Shelvocke's A Voyage round the World by Way 

 of the Great South Sea . . . London, 1726. 



** Athenaeum, April 22, 1905, p. 499. 



*= Xanadu, p. 327. 



