at the approach of death, cleaving in solitude to life and society, as in the Poem of the Forsaken Indian; by shewing, as in the Stanzas entitled We are seven, the perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion; or by displaying the strength of fraternal, or to speak more philosophically, of moral attachment when early associated with the great and beautiful objects of nature, as in The Brothers; or, as in the Incident of Simon Lee, by placing my Reader in the way of receiving from ordinary moral sensations another and more salutary impression than we are accustomed to receive from them. It has also been part of my general purpose to attempt to sketch characters under the influence of less impassioned feelings, as in the Old Man travelling, The two Thieves, &c. characters of which the elements are simple, belonging rather to nature than to mannners, such
