A violet by a mossy stone.
Half hidden from the eye;
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.
The last line was especially chosen as the object of ridicule; but I
think with most of us the feeling will be, that its very simplicity of
expression is overflowing in suggestion, it throws us back upon our own
experience; for, instead of trying to utter what he felt, he says in
those simple and common words, "You who have known anything of the kind,
will know what the difference to me is, and only you can know." "My
intention and desire," he says in one of his essays, "are that the
interest of the poem shall owe nothing to the circumstances; but that
the circumstances shall be made interesting by the thing itself." In
most novels, for instance, the attempt is made to interest us in
worthless, commonplace people, whom, if we had our choice, we would far
rather not meet at all, by surrounding them with peculiar and
extraordinary circumstances; but this is a low source of interest.
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