BIRDS AND POETS. 
175 
should have yet produced the most exact and singularly mi- 
nute characterization of its peculiar song — 
" My sense was filled 
With that new blissful golden melody. 
A living death was in each gush of sounds, 
Each family of rapturous hurried notes 
That fell, one after one, yet all at once, 
Like pearl-beads dropping sudden from their string, 
And then another, then another strain," &;c. 
The very collocation of the words themselves, produces 
upon the ear the effect of a remote resemblance. Alas, poor 
Keats! The savage Archers reached him on his airy perch, 
and cut short, forever, those miraculous strains. But though 
now he be "in his far Rome grave," among "the sleepers in 
the oblivious valley," yet must the echoes he has waked live 
m still reverberations musical, through all the enchanted 
caves of human thought. They are deathless, for in him 
" Language was a perpetual Orphic song 
Which ruled with Dosdal harmony a throng 
Of thoughts and forms." 
But concerning Wordsworth — 
" Once have I marked thee happycst guest, 
In all this covert of the blest. 
Hail to THEE far above tlie rest 
In joy of voice and pinion ! 
A life, a presence, like the air. 
Scattering thy gladness without care. 
Too blest with any one to pair ; 
Thyself thine own enjoyment!" 
The poet thus furnishes us to hand an exquisite charac- 
terization of himself in the choir of this " covert of the 
Blest," through whose shades we thus tardily " linger listen- 
ing." But which shall be prototype to him? 
