did my I had no human fears: She seem'd a thing that could not feel touch years. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Roll'd round in earth's course With rocks and stones and trees! (1) In the sixth edition his Elements Criticism, Lord Kames offered the following verses by a poet inferior rank as an example what he called stretching: When black-brow'd Night her dusky mantle spread, And wrapp'd in solemn gloom the sable sky; When soothing her opiate dews had shed, And seal'd in slumbers ev'ry eye: My wakeful thoughts admit no balmy rest, Nor the sweet bliss soft oblivion share ... (qtd. in Kames 2: 350; italics added) (2) While the first line sounds like the opening Wordsworth's A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, published fifteen years later, for Lord Kames, it was noteworthy only because the superfluous epithet, silken slumbers. In such verses, Kames complained, substantive is faithfully attended by some tumid epithet; like young master, who cannot walk abroad without having a lac'd livery-man at his heels. Thus in reading without taste, an emphasis is laid on every word; and in singing without taste, every note is grac'd. Such epithets, instead pleasing, produces satiety and disgust (350). Wordsworth shared Lord Kames's distaste for redundancy epithets. It is true that he used three epithets in A slumber--human fears, earthly years, and diurnal course--but none them (with the possible exception diurnal course) qualify as tumid. Wordsworth appropriated a common figure speech from the poetic tradition: the figure, which appears, for example, in Thomas Warton the Elder's Ode to Sleep (1748): Rock'd on the high and giddy Mast, Regardless the wint'ry Blast, How happy the wet Sea-boy lies, While sweetest Slumbers his Eyes. (37-40; italics added) (3) It also appears in John Langhorne's Caesar's Dream (1758), in which the Queen Glory appears to Caesar on the eve the Roman invasion Britain: 'Twas then, while stillness grasp'd the sleeping air, And dewy slumbers seal'd the eye care; Divine Ambition to her votary came. ... (French 6: 489; italics added) following year, William Mason used the figure in one the odes in his verse drama Caractacus, a poem Wordsworth used on several occasions in the 1790's (Wu 97-98): While the pleas'd pow'r sinks gently down the skies, And seals with hand down the Druid's slumb'ring eyes. (French 6: 194; italics added) Later in the century, Helen Maria Williams used the figure in her poem The Bastille: Vision (1790): Bastille! within thy hideous pile, Which stains blood defile, Thus rose the captive's sighs, Till seal'd his weeping eyes. (Julia 2: 219; italics added) As these examples illustrate, the sealing figure had become a stock metaphor long before Wordsworth penned A in Goslar in the winter 1798-99. What distinguishes Wordsworth's opening line from the hackneyed verses his predecessors is the subtle change he introduced into the sealing figure--namely, the substitution spirit for eyes, the conventional object seal. Not only does spirit exploit the sibilance slumber and seal, but it alters and enriches their meaning. In conventional usage, slumber meant either sleep or death, while seal meant simply to close. In Wordsworth's poem, by contrast, the poet's slumber is wholly subjective--a condition not the body, but the spirit. By the same token, seal suggests an event of graver import than the simple physical act closing--perhaps a blessing or a curse. spiritual connotations these words derive, ultimately, from the Authorized Version the Bible, where they appear repeatedly in connection with prophecy. …