Another story survives, of his vindictive
spirit giving birth to his first rhymes. A meddling old lady, who used to
visit his mother and was possessed of a curious belief in a future
transmigration to our satellite--the bleakness of whose scenery she had
not realized--having given him some cause of offence, he stormed out to
his nurse that he "could not bear the sight of the witch," and vented his
wrath in the quatrain.--
In Nottingham county there lives, at Swan Green,
As curst an old lady as ever was seen;
And when she does die, which I hope will be soon,
She firmly believes she will go to the moon.
The poet himself dates his "first dash into poetry" a year later (1800),
from his juvenile passion for his cousin Margaret Parker, whose subsequent
death from an injury caused by a fall he afterwards deplored in a
forgotten elegy. "I do not recollect," he writes through the transfiguring
mists of memory, "anything equal to the _transparent_ beauty of my cousin,
or to the sweetness of her temper, during the short period of our
intimacy. She looked as if she had been made out of a rainbow--all beauty
and peace.
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