could credit, and the nine roods became four. In the same poem the over-strained horse stood "foaming like a mountain cataract"; the foam of a cataract is a continuous moving mass of white; the horse could not be more than thickly flecked; and the words in 1820 were altered to "white with foam as if with cleaving sleet." In the lines "To my Sister," Wordsworth wrote, in 1798: One moment now may give us more Than fifty years of reason. The assertion was too extreme and too definite in its excess, and the closing words became, in 1837 "Than years of toiling reason." 8. Errors of Triviality and Needless Grotesqueness. — The instances are many. Simon Lee, during two and twenty years, stood before the reader in that "long blue livery coat" That's fair behind and fair before, and which is only faintly referred to after 1815; during several years more he remained bereft of his right eye; finally the eye was restored to Simon, but the lustre of his livery was dimmed. It did not assist the pathos of the poem to make the old huntsman too piteously grotesque a figure. In 1819 the opening stanza of "Peter Bell," Part I, ran as follows: And, again, in a later stanza there is a second bone-banging. Already in the following year this had been erased. A verse of the poem which Shelley prefixed as a motto to his satirical" Peter Bell the Third " - that verse descriptive of a pos sible vision of prosaic horror below the water into which the Potter is staring: Is it a party in a parlour Crammed just as they on earth were crammed, Some sipping punch some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see, All silent and all - damned? "The that verse, which is no invention of Shelley's - disappeared hastily, and disappeared so effectually that its existence at any time in Wordsworth's poems has been denied. Idiot Boy," written with speed and in a gleeful mood, was always a favourite with its author. Yet he made a sacrifice of some passages, which seemed to approach too near the ludicrous : Beneath the moon which shines so bright, Till she is tired, let Betty Foy With girt and stirrup fiddle-faddle; Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy? Betty fiddle-faddled from 1798 to 1820; and then she or her poet tired, and she fiddle-faddled no more. In that tragic poem "The Thorn" the infant's grave was at first described as if it had been studied by an undertaker : ee I've measured it from side to side, "T is three feet long, and two feet wide. Wordsworth declared to Crabb Robinson that these lines ought to be liked"; and perhaps he was right, for it is only conjectured that Martha Ray buried her baby there, and we are interested in receiving the exact evidence of a prosaic witness. Nevertheless, the lines were dignified as follows: Though but of compass small, and bare The fire which burned in Martha's bones, when Stephen deserted her, in the earlier record, Dried her body to a cinder, And almost turned her brain to tinder. For which lines we read from 1815 onwards ee A fire was kindled in her breast, Which might not burn itself to rest. Old Farmer Simpson," who knew the sorrows of Martha, disappeared from the poem in 1820, and "grey-haired Wilfred of the glen" enters vice Farmer Simpson removed. The processes by which dignity and eloquence were added to the fine poem Beggars can be traced in the notes of the present volume. In 1807 the "Blind Highland Boy" embarked on his perilous voyage in a humble craft: ee A household tub, like one of those Which women use to wash their clothes. In 1815, on Coleridge's suggestion, a turtle-shell replaced the honest, if prosaic, tub; and by and by the turtle-shell came to resemble the pearly car of Amphitrite. Many readers will prefer and perhaps justly— the original version of the voyage. Wordsworth's poems, even 9. Intrusion of the Personal. when on objective themes, are impressed with the characteristics of his mind; they are distinctively Wordsworthean; but as he advanced in the poetic art he desired to avoid the intrusion of all that belonged to him accidentally as an individual, and also the intrusion of self-consciousness in poems where it was needless or out of place. On this point he was sensitive. In "Beggars "the line In all my walks through field or town" was altered, as he himself declared, because it was "obtrusively personal"; the subject of the poem was the majestic vagrant and her wanton boys; it ९९ neither concerns them nor us to know where the historical William Wordsworth chose to direct his walks. Probably for a like reason he altered a line in "Personal Talk " By my half-kitchen and half-parlour fire. At one time he regretted the loss of these words, which reminded him of the modest cottage at Grasmere and its happy interior; but the fact that Dorothy cooked in the sitting-room does not really concern the reader of the poem. In the "Poems" of 1807 appeared a group with the general title "Moods of My Own Mind"; the title disappeared from later editions. So also from a "A Whirl-blast," the concluding lines Oh! grant me, Heaven, a heart at ease, Even in appearances like these, Enough to nourish and to stir my mind were omitted as a self-conscious return of the poet upon himself. It was that reserve of the personal which is an element of artistic idealization that led Wordsworth to substitute imaginary names, Emma, Emmeline, Laura, for the actual Dorothy and Dora; but in two instances, after the loss of his daughter (in "The Kitten and the Falling Leaves" and "The Longest Day "), when she entered into the ideality of death, Wordsworth indulged his desire to connect her memory with his poems, and displaced "Laura" for the "Dora." name 10. Extravagance or Violence of Feeling. In the "Tribute to the Memory of a Dog," feelings were expressed and language was employed which at a later time seemed to Wordsworth of a kind that should be reserved for human creatures. The two opening lines — Lie here sequester'd :- be this little mound For ever thine, and be it holy ground were omitted in 1827. The line "I pray'd for thee, and that thy end were past" became in 1820 "We grieved for thee, and wished thy end were past." In 1837 the reading For love that comes wherever life and sense replaced the earlier ee For love, that comes to all; the holy sense, Little Music" gallantly tried to save her drowning companion. Wordsworth did not love the generous dog less; but he was unwilling to associate the idea of "holiness" with a brute; and perhaps in the hierarchy of our emotions more is lost than gained by an unreasonable levelling-up. Excess of an opposite kind was tempered in the later texts of "A Poet's Epitaph." The lawyer is forbidden to approach the poet's resting place. In 1800 the lines ran Go, carry to some other place The falsehood of thy sallow face. Lamb, in a letter to Wordsworth, censured the common satire upon parsons and lawyers, and also the words addressed to the philosopher, "thy pin point of a soul." Wordsworth yielded; the pin-point became first "that abject thing, thy soul," and finally "thy ever-dwindling soul"; the indictment of the lawyer was reduced to The keenness of that practised eye, The "Ode, 1815," was written in a mood of high and stern enthusiasm; Wordsworth triumphed over the defeat of the enemies of England and of freedom; the divine purpose |