..."when the world was puddle-wonderful." Wordsworth had a puddle of his own that he carefully measured from side to side: "Tis three feet long and two feet wide." How much curiosity does it take? How much interest in puffballs? WH Hudson watched a London sparrow...

...the left is a muddy pond, which is never dry, and yet so small it ought to be occasionally dry: "I've measured it from side to side: / 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide." And beside the thorn, one other thing — a hill of moss, "Just half a foot in height," of "lovely...

...(Biographia, II:79, i0)' tne sort of Wordsworthian 'quaintness' that prompted The Stuffed Owl: Tve measured it from side to side: / 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide' ('The Thorn', 31-3; Wordsworth, 60).^ (That whole volume is an oblique part of the Coleridgean tradition,...

...'About three spans wide and two spans tall' is precise in her memory, but it deliberately echoes 'I've measured it from side to side / 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide.' According to Coleridge, these lines 'are felt by many unprejudiced and unsophisticated hearts as sudden...

...Wordsworth's characterization of the sea-captaiu, who may appear at first sight to be empirically rationalist ('I measured it from side to side ] Tis three feet long and two feet wide'), but whom Wordsworth describes, in his Note to the poem, as a superstitious man, 'of slow faculties...

...espy; And to the left, three yards beyond, You see a litde muddy pond 30 Of water, never dry; I've measured it from side to side: Tis three feet long, and two feet wide. 4 And close beside this aged thom, There is a fresh and lovely sight, A beauteous heap, a hill of moss,...

...Ballads, and which would reappear in Biographia, illustrated there by passages from Wordsworth like 'I've measured it from side to side; / 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide' (BL ii 79; 5on.). Such poetry, it seems, fulfils a 'natural' aesthetic all too completely, isn't imaginative...

...left espy: And to the left. three yards heyond. You see a little muddy pond Of water. never dry: 1've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long. and two feet wide.2' Such hathos is actually quite typically authentic of the first attempts of oral people to enter...

...in Wordsworth's 'Thorn': There is a thorn; it looks so old, In truth you'd find it hard to say I've measured it from side to side: 'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.29 The epistle's other lines, however, would fare as poorly in Wordsworth's Preface as the eight...

...to make Romanticists wince (as well they might : Wordsworth did infamously write in The Thorn' "I've measured it from side to side : [/] Tis three feet long and two feet wide"19), but if inspired as criticism, his game is comedy and his mode pastiche. The octave gives...