Redundant are thy locks, thy lips as fair
As when their breath enriched Thessalian air.

"No spectre greets me-no vain shadow this;
Come, blooming hero, place thee by my side!
Give, on this well-known couch, one nuptial kiss
To me, this day a second time thy bride!"
Jove frowned in heaven; the conscious Parcæ threw
Upon those roseate lips a Stygian hue.

"This visage tells thee that my doom is past:

Know, virtue were not virtue, if the joys

Of sense were able to return as fast

And surely as they vanish. Earth destroys
Those raptures duly, Erebus disdains;
Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains.

"Be taught, O faithful consort, to control
Rebellious passion; for the gods approve
The depth, and not the tumult, of the soul,
A fervent, not ungovernable, love.

Thy transports moderate; and meekly mourn
When I depart, for brief is my sojourn."

There is certainly an air of classic majesty and a richness of colour about this which contrasts curiously with the strong sketch of the lonely leech - gatherer, though there seems to me a fitness in the fact that the style of the poem which paints the humble self-reliance of desolate fortitude is for the most part cast in the mould of a bare and almost bleak dignity.

"But I must come to an end. The later style has, I think, this advantage over the earlier, that where its subject is equally fine-which, as I admit, it often is not-the workmanship is far more complete, often almost of crystal beauty, and without the blots, the baldness, the deadwood, which almost all Wordsworth's earlier works exhibit. Where, for instance, in all the range of poetry, shall we find a more crystal piece of workmanship than the sonnet-written, I think, as late as 1827, and addressed to Lady Beaumont in her seventieth year-with which I may conclude this paper:

'Such age how beautiful! O lady bright,
Whose mortal lineaments seem ali refined
By favouring nature and a saintly mind

To something purer and more exquisite

Than flesh and blood-whene'er thou meet'st my sight,

When I behold thy blanched unwithered cheek,

Thy temples fringed with locks of gleaming white,
And head that droops because the soul is meek,
Thee with the welcome snowdrop I compare,

That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb

From desolation toward the genial prime.

Or with the moon conquering earth's misty air,
And filling more and more with crystal light

As pensive evening deepens into night."

EXTRACT

FROM THE CONCLUSION OF A POEM COMPOSED IN ANTICIPATION OF LEAVING SCHOOL.

THIS was written in 1786, and first printed in 1815. The following note, concerning it is from those dictated by Wordsworth in 1843, at the request of his friend, Miss Isabella Fenwick, giving the circumstances under which many of his poems were composed:

"Written at Hawkshead. The beautiful image with which this poem concludes suggested itself to me while I was resting in a boat along with my companions under the shade of a magnificent row of sycamores, which then extended their branches from the shore of the promontory upon which stands the ancient, and at that time the more picturesque, Hall of Coniston, the seat of the Le Flemings from very early times. The poem of which it was the conclusion was of many hundred lines, and contained thoughts and images most of which have been dispersed through my other writings."

3-5. That, wheresoe'er, etc. A MS. copy mentioned by Knight

reads:

"That when the close of life draws near,*
And I must quit this earthly sphere,

If in that hour a tender tie," etc.

9-14. Thus, while the sun, etc.

The text is that of the ed. of 1845,

which we have followed except in the occasional instances mentioned in these notes. The ed. of 1815 reads:

"Thus when the sun, prepared for rest,
Hath gained the precincts of the west,
Though his departing radiance fail
To illuminate the hollow vale," etc.

The ed. of 1832 has:

"Thus from the precincts of the west,

The sun, when sinking down to rest," etc.

The ed. of 1836 changes when in this latter to "while." In 1820 the last line was changed to "On the dear mountain-tops where first he rose," but the reading of 1815 (as in the text) was restored in 1845. It is strange that the poet should have made any changes in this poem or the next.

WRITTEN IN VERY EARLY YOUTH.

PROBABLY written in 1786, and first printed in 1807.

4. Is cropping audibly, etc. The ed. of 1807 has "Is up and cropping yet his later meal." In 8 below, it has "seems for comes.

* Knight has "dear," which is either his misprint or a slip of the pen in the MS.

THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN.

WRITTEN in 1797, and published in 1800. Wordsworth says in his MS. notes: "This arose out of my observation of the affecting music of these birds hanging in this way in the London streets during the freshness and stillness of the Spring morning.'

Myers (p. 16) remarks: **** Wordsworth's limitations were inseparably connected with his strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had only served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the bewilderment of London taught him to recognize with an intenser joy such fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as were to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load impossible to shake off. And what hath Nature,' he plaintively asked

'And what hath Nature but the blank void sky
And the thronged river toiling to the main?'

But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one may say, the poet not of London considered as London, but of London considered as a part of the country. . . . Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision and memory none is more exquisite than the Reverie of Poor Susan. The picture is one of those which come home to many a country heart with one of those sudden 'revulsions into the natural' which philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest and best known of all these poems is the Sonnet on Westminster Bridge, 'Earth hath not anything to show more fair;' in which Nature has reasserted her dominion over the works of all the multitude of men; and in the early clearness the poet beholds the great city-as Sterling imagined it on his dying bed-'not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand, and everlasting.' And even in later life, when Wordsworth was often in London, and was welcome in any society, he never lost this external manner of regarding it. He was always of the same mind as the group of listeners in his Power of Music:

'Now, Coaches and Chariots! roar on like a stream!
Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue.'

The following stanza is appended to the poem in the ed. of 1800:

"Poor outcast! return-to receive thee once more
The house of the father will open its door.
And thou* once again, in thy plain russet gown,
May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own."

1. Wood Street. There are at least four streets of this name in London, but the one meant here is evidently that which runs from Cheap

Knight, in his collation of the various readings, makes this read "then;" but, if it reads thus in the ed. of 1800, it is obviously a misprint for "thou."

side northward. Lothbury (7) is a street behind the Bank of England, not far away.

"WE ARE SEVEN."

THE history of this poem (first printed in the Lyrical Ballads, 1798) is given by Wordsworth as follows:

64

Written at Alfoxden in the spring of 1798, under circumstances somewhat remarkable. The little girl who is the heroine I met within the area of Goodrich Castle in the year 1793. Having left the Isle of Wight and crossed Salisbury Plain. I proceeded by Bristol up the Wye, and so on to North Wales, to the Vale of Clwydd, where I spent my summer under the roof of the father of my friend, Robert Jones. In reference to this poem I will here mention one of the most remarkable facts in my own poetic history and that of Mr. Coleridge. In the spring of the year 1798, he, my sister, and myself started from Alfoxden, pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Lenton and the Valley of Stones near it; and as our united funds were very small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine set up by Phillips the bookseller, and edited by Dr. Aikin. Accordingly we set off and proceeded along the Quantock Hills towards Watchet, and in the course of this walk was planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner, founded on a dream, as Mr. Coleridge said, of his friend, Mr. Cruikshank. As we endeavoured to proceed conjointly (I speak of the same evening) our respective manners proved so widely different that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only have been a clog. We returned after a few days from a delightful tour, of which I have many pleasant, and some of them droll enough, recollections. We returned by Dulverton to Alfoxden. The Ancient Mariner grew and grew till it became too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of five pounds, and we began to talk of a volume, which was to consist, as Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatual subjects taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through an imaginative medium. Accordingly I wrote The Idiot Boy,' Her eyes are wild,' etc., ' We are Seven,' The Thorn, and some others. To return to 'We are Seven,' the piece that called forth this note, I composed it while walking in the grove at Alfoxden. My friends will not deem it too trifling to relate that while walking to and fro I composed the last stanza first, having begun with the last line. When it was all but finished, I came in and recited it to Mr. Coleridge and my sister, and said, 'A prefatory stanza must be added, and I should sit down to our little tea-meal with greater pleasure if my task were finished.' I mentioned in substance what I wished to be expressed, and Coleridge immediately threw off the stanza thus:

A little child, dear brother Jem 'etc.