strictly.  The Jews, who are numerous in this part of the Rhine, greatly surpass the German peasantry in the beauty of their features and in the intelligence of their countenances.  But the lower classes of the German peasantry have, here at least, the air of people grievously opprest.  Nursing mothers at the age of seven or eight and twenty often look haggard and far more decayed and withered than women of Cumberland and Westmoreland twice their age.  This comes from being under-fed and over-worked in their vineyards in a hot and glaring sun. [In pencil on opposite page—­The three went from my house in Bryanston-street, London—­E.Q.]

180. *_On the Power of Sound_. [LI.]

Rydal Mount, 1828.  I have often regretted that my tour in Ireland, chiefly performed in the short days of October in a carriage and four (I was with Mr. Marshall), supplied my memory with so few images that were new and with so little motive to write.  The lines, however, in this poem, ‘Thou too he heard, lone eagle!’ &c., were suggested near the Giant’s Causeway, or rather at the promontory of Fairhead, where a pair of eagles wheeled above our heads, and darted off as if to hide themselves in a blaze of sky made by the setting sun.

181. Peter Bell:  a Tale.

                DEDICATION. 
        ‘What’s in a Name?’
    ‘Brutus will start a Spirit as soon as Caesar!’

To ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ., P.L., ETC., ETC. 
MY DEAR FRIEND,

The Tale of ‘Peter Bell,’ which I now introduce to your notice, and to that of the Public, has, in its Manuscript state, nearly survived its minority:—­for it first saw the light in the summer of 1798.  During this long interval, pains have been taken at different times to make the production less unworthy of a favourable reception; or, rather, to fit it for filling permanently a station, however humble, in the Literature of our Country.  This has, indeed, been the aim of all my endeavours in Poetry, which, you know, have been sufficiently laborious to prove that I deem the Art not lightly to be approached; and that the attainment of excellence in it may laudably be made the principal object of intellectual pursuit by any man who, with reasonable consideration of circumstances, has faith in his own impulses.

The Poem of ‘Peter Bell,’ as the Prologue will show, was composed under a belief that the Imagination not only does not require for its exercise the intervention of supernatural agency, but that, though such agency be excluded, the faculty may be called forth as imperiously and for kindred results of pleasure, by incidents, within the compass of poetic probability, in the humblest departments of daily life.  Since that Prologue was written, you have exhibited most splendid effects of judicious daring, in the opposite and usual course.  Let this acknowledgment make my peace with the lovers of the supernatural; and I am persuaded