MORE BORROWED THOUGHTS

O many are the poets that are sown By nature men endowed with highest gifts, The vision and the facility divine, Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse, Nor having e'er, as life advanced, been led by circumstance to take the height, The measure of themselves, &c. Wordsworth's *Excursion*, B. i. This admired passage has its prototype in the following from the *Lettere di Battista Guarini*, who points to a thought of similar kind in Dante:— "O quante nolili ingegni si perdono che riuscerebbe mirabili [in poesia] se dal seguir le inchinazione loro non fossero, ò dà loro appetiti ò da i Padri lor…