Of this ballad, and The Sailor's Mother (above, p. 186), and Beggar: (above, p. 318), which were all written during March 11-14, 1802, Mr. Hutchinson remarks in the course of an interesting note (Poems in Two Volumes, ed. 1897, vol. i. p. 189): 'We learn from Dorothy's Journal that on March 5 and 7, brother and sister were engaged on the revisal of the Lyrical Ballads of 1800, of which a new edition with revised text and expanded Preface appeared in the early summer of 1802. Now the three ballads of March 11-14 read almost like specimen verses, composed expressly to illustrate the working of the author's principles of poetic style.' P. 122. IX. LUCY GRAY; OR, SOLITUDE :-Of this poem, founded on fact, Wordsworth says: "The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualising of the character, might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences, which I have endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind. This is not spoken to his disparagement, far from it; but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may enlarge the circle of their sensibilities, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgement.'-I. F. P. 124. X. WE ARE SEVEN, 1. 4. This first stanza, with 'A little child, dear brother Jim,' or rather 'Jem,' in allusion to a friend James Tobin, who was so-called, for its first line, was thrown off by Coleridge on the afternoon during which Wordsworth had composed the rest of the poem. Wordsworth had recited his poem to his sister and Coleridge, saying that a prefatory stanza must be added, and mentioning in substance what he wished to be expressed.-From I. F. The first line stood, 'A simple child, dear brother Jim,' until 1815. The Fenwick note to this poem contains an interesting account of the genesis of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, which was planned in common during a short walking tour made by the two poets and Dorothy Wordsworth in the spring of 1798. P. 126. XI. THE IDLE SHEPHERD-BOYS; OR, DUNGEON-GHYLL FORCE, 1. 20. Rusty Hats is a perfectly intelligible expression, but it is curious that in the Fenwick note we read, '. . . My shepherd-boys trimmed their rustic hats as described in the poem.' The whole Fenwick note is valuable as literary criticism. 'When Coleridge and Southey were walking together upon the Fells, Southey observed that, if I wished to be considered a faithful painter of rural manners, I ought not to have said that my shepherd-boys trimmed their rustic hats as described in the poem. Just as the words had passed his lips two boys appeared with the very plant entwined round their hats. I have often wondered that Southey, who rambled so much about the mountains, should have fallen into this mistake, and I record it as a warning for others who with far less opportunity than my dear friend had of know ing what things are, and far less sagacity, give way to presumptuous criticism, from which he was free, though in this matter mistaken. In describing a tarn under Helvellyn, I say: There sometimes doth a leaping fish Send through the tarn a lonely cheer. This was branded by a critic of these days, in a review ascribed to Mrs. Barbauld, as unnatural and absurd. I admire the genius of Mrs. Barbauld, and am certain that, had her education been favourable to imaginative influences, no female of her day would have been more likely to sympathise with that image, and to acknowledge the truth of the sentiment.'-I. F. P. 128. XII. ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS. Retine vim istam, falsa enim dicam, si coges':-This is a translation of an oracle quoted by Eusebius in his Preparatio Evangelica, bk. vi. ch. v., kλeie Biŋv kúρTOS TE λóywv. Yevdnyópa λéğw. In editions from 1800 to 1843 the title was Anecdote for Fathers, showing how the Practice of Lying may be taught. The motto was substituted for the explanation in ed. 1845. L. 1. The boy was a son of my friend Basil Montagu, who had been two or three years under our care.'-I. F. L. 10. Kilve:-A village on the Bristol Channel about a mile from Alfoxden. P. 129, 1. 24. Liswyn farm:—‘A beautiful spot on the Wye, where Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and I had been visiting the famous John Thelwall, who had taken refuge from politics, after a trial for high treason, with a view to bring up his family by the profits of agriculture, which proved as unfortunate a speculation as that he had fled from.'-I. F. P. 130. XIII. RURAL ARCHITECTURE, 1. 3. The height of a counsellor's bag is not at the present day an illuminating expression; but in Wordsworth's day (as we may gather from this passage), and even as lately as thirty or forty years ago, it would have been intelligible enough to any one who had visited a court of law. Barristers used to carry their blue or red brief-bags slung over their shoulders and hanging down their backs a practice which has almost, if not entirely, died out. I owe this statement to a retired barrister who remembers the custom. 1800:-Dated by Wordsworth 1801, but first published in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800. P. 133. XV. To H. C. :--Hartley Coleridge, first-born child of the poet Coleridge, born 1796, himself the author of exquisite sonnets, died 1849. P. 134. XVI. INFLUENCE OF NATURAL OBJECTS, in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth. From an unpublished poem :-From The Prelude, i. 401. P. 134. This extract is reprinted from 'The Friend':-No. 19 (Dec. 28, 1809) of Coleridge's famous periodical. L. 20. The trembling lake :-Esthwaite, the lake close to Hawkshead, where Wordsworth spent his school-days. P. 135, l. 56. The picture presented by these lines as a whole is as vivid as possible, but the exact meaning of the expression 'spinning still the rapid line of motion' is not very clear. "Still' must mean "continuously,' and the idea seems to be that the continuous streaming past of the banks resembles the continuous flow of thread from the spinningwheel. Cp. note on An Evening Walk, 1. 48, above, p. 481. L. 63. In The Prelude the line runs: 'Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep.' The change is for the worse in point of sound, but Wordsworth probably felt that the substituted comparison was the more appropriate; or he may have made the alteration under the influence of his well-known dislike of the adjectival use of substantives. Cp. note on Descriptive Sketches, 1. 238, above, p. 488. P. 137. XVIII. THE NORMAN BOY:-The subject of this poem was sent to me by Mrs. Ogle, to whom I was personally unknown, with a hope on her part that I might be induced to relate the incident in verse; and I do not regret that I took the trouble; for not improbably the fact is illustrative of the boy's early piety, and may concur with my other little pieces on children, to produce profitable reflection among my youthful readers. This is said, however, with an absolute conviction that children will derive most benefit from books which are not unworthy the perusal of persons of any age. I protest with my whole heart against those productions, so abundant in the present day, in which the doings of children are dwelt upon as if they were incapable of being interested in anything else. On this subject I have dwelt at length in the poem on the growth of my own mind.—I. F. P. 140. XIX. THE POET'S DREAM, 1. 28. A hollow dale in the burialground of Allonville in the Pays de Caux, which was transformed into a chapel to our Lady of Peace' by the Abbé du Détroit in 1696 (from Wordsworth's note). P. 141, 1. 73. The allusion is probably to Hippolyte de la Morvonnais, a French poet, who was a great admirer of Wordsworth. In an interesting contribution to Prof. Knight's Eversley edition (vol. vi. p. 429), Prof. Legouis quotes the passage of de la Morvonnais to which Wordsworth probably alludes: Enfant, il (Dieu) te promet le domaine de l'ange P. 142. XX. THE WESTMORELAND GIRL. This Westmoreland girl was Sarah Mackereth of Wyke Cottage, Grasmere.-Prof. Knight, who also quotes from a letter of Wordsworth that the poem 'is truth to the letter.' POEMS FOUNDED ON THE AFFECTIONS P. 146. I. THE BROTHERS, 1. 65, Footnote. I have not been able to trace the prose description here referred to. The only published work of Gilbert's which is extant in the British Museum and the Bodleian, and is mentioned in his life in the Dict. Nat. Biog. (Supplement, vol. 11.), is that containing the two curious poems The Hurricane: a Theosophical and Western Eclogue, and A Solitary Effusion in a Summer's Evening (Bristol, 1796). There is no description of the calenture either in the verse or in the prose of this volume. Gilbert was acquainted with Cottle, the Bristol publisher, and Southey and Coleridge. Southey wrote of him in a private letter, after he had disappeared and was supposed to be dead: 'He was the most insane person I have ever known at large, and his insanity smothered his genius.' Gilbert's biographer in the Dict. Nat. Biog., Dr. Garnett, somewhat understates the case when he says that he 'gives few tokens of insanity as long as he keeps to description'; but it is certain that he gives many tokens of real, though disordered, genius. The notes which form the greater part of his volume are one of the strangest medleys of wild nonsense, curious knowledge, and occasional penetration that have ever been published: they owe their remembrance, however, to the fact that Wordsworth quoted from them a passage, which he called one of the finest passages of modern English prose,' in his notes to The Excursion (cp. vol. 111. p. 554), and which thus conspicuously brought forward,' says Dr. Garnett, seems to have inspired Keats with the Darien simile in his sonnet On opening Chapman's Homer.' P. 148, 1. 145. The impressive circumstance here described actually took place some years ago in this country, upon an eminence called Kidstow Pike, one of the highest of the mountains that surround Haweswater. The summit of the pike was stricken by lightning; and every trace of one of the fountains disappeared, while the other continued to flow as before.-W. (1800). P. 149, l. 183. There is not anything more worthy of remark in the manners of the inhabitants of these mountains, than the tranquillity, I might say indifference, with which they think and talk upon the subject of death. Some of the country churchyards, as here described, do not contain a single tombstone, and most of them have a very small number. --W. (1800.) P. 153, 1. 369. This line and the following differ to a considerable extent from the passage as it stood in the original. The recasting was no doubt partly due to Coleridge, who, in criticising Wordsworth's theory of the identity of the language of prose and that of verse, wrote (Biog. Lit., ch. xviii. note, p. 186, Bohn): In those parts of Mr. Wordsworth's works which I have thoroughly studied, I find fewer instances in which this [viz., rendering a passage unrecognisable as verse by simply transcribing it as prose] would be practicable, than I have met in many poems, where an approximation of prose has been sedulously and on system guarded against. Indeed, excepting the stanzas already quoted from The Sailor's Mother, I can recollect but one instance, viz., a short passage of four or five lines in The Brothers, that model of English pastoral, which I never yet read with unclouded eye: "James, pointing to its summit, over which they had all purposed to return together, informed them that he would wait for them there. They parted, and his comrades passed that way some two hours after, but they did not find him at the appointed place, a circumstance of which they took no heed but one of them going by chance [at night] into the house, which at this time was James's house, learnt there that nobody had seen him all that day." The only change which has been made is in the position of the little word "there" in two instances, the position in the original being clearly such as is not adopted in ordinary conversation. The other words printed in italics were so marked because, though good and genuine English, they are not the phraseology of common conversation either in the word put in apposition, or in the connection by the genitive pronoun. Men in general would have said, "but that was a circumstance they paid no attention to" or "took no notice of," and the language is, on the theory of the Preface, justified only by the narrator's being the Vicar. Yet if any ear could suspect that these sentences were ever printed as metre, on those very words alone could the suspicion have been grounded.' P. 155. II. ARTEGAL AND ELIDURE (see the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Milton's History of England) :-This was written at Rydal Mount, as a token of affectionate respect for the memory of Milton. 'I have determined,' says he in his Preface to his History of England, 'to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales, be it for nothing else but in favour of our English poets and rhetoricians, who by their wit well know how to use them judiciously.'-I. F. The reference to Milton should be book 1. par. 2, and for 'wit' should be read ‘art.' L. 16. Who never tasted grace, and goodness ne'er had felt' :-I have not been able to trace this quotation. It does not appear to be a paraphrase of anything in Milton's History; nor, so far as I can find, is it an Alexandrine from Spenser's Faerie Queene or Thompson's Castle of Indolence. P. 157, 1. 92. Poorly provided, poorly followed. Milton's History, bk. 1. p. 34 (ed. 1695) has in a poor Habit, with only ten followers.' Wordsworth, however, appears to be making an actual quotation from some source to me unknown. |