as Remorse. The author considered the scene unfit for the stage, and printed it in the Appendix to Remorse. A version from a MS. is given by Cottle in his Early Recollections of Coleridge, 1837, vol. i. pp. 235-238. The opening lines are omitted from the later editions of Lyrical Ballads, where the scene begins with—

The line

"But that entrance, Mother!
·!"

"And once as he was working in the cellar,"

becomes in Lyrical Ballads, 1802 and 1805

"And once as he was working near the cell."

In Remorse

"And once as he was working near this dungeon."

PAGE 59.-Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree.

The date of this poem is 1795, but it was in part written by Wordsworth when at school at Hawkshead. The alterations in the later texts are not many. following is the most considerable :

The

"In youth by science nursed

And led by nature into a wild scene

Of lofty hopes, he to the world went forth,
A favored being, knowing no desire

Which genius did not hallow, 'gainst the taint
Of dissolute tongues, and jealousy, and hate
And scorn, against all enemies prepared,
All but neglect. The world, for so it thought,
Owed him no service: he was like a plant
Fair to the sun, the darling of the winds,

But hung with fruit which no one, that passed by,

Regarded, and, his spirit damped at once,

With indignation did he turn away

And with," &c.

1800.

In 1802 Wordsworth omitted the image of the plant fruitful but unregarded, reading—

"Owed him no service: wherefore he at once

With indignation turn'd himself away."

"The individual whose habits and character are here given, was a gentleman of the neighbourhood, a man of talent and learning, who had been educated at one of our Universities, and returned to pass his time in seclusion on his own estate. He died a bachelor in middle age." -Wordsworth: Fenwick note.

PAGE 63.-The Nightingale.

The lines from "On moonlight bushes" to "love-torch" were omitted in Lyrical Ballads, 1800, 1802, 1805. But they reappear in the poem as printed in Sibylline Leaves, 1817. The words “ My Friend and my Friend's Sister" [Dorothy Wordsworth] were changed in Sibylline Leaves to" My Friend, and thou, our Sister."

PAGE 69.-The Female Vagrant.

This is an extract from the poem first published in full -seventy-four stanzas-in 1842 with the title "Guiltand Sorrow; or, incidents upon Salisbury Plain." The date assigned is 1793-94, though it should be observed that in the Fenwick note Wordsworth says, "In fact, much of the Female Vagrant's story was composed at least two years before." In the summer of 1793 he spent two days in wandering on foot over Salisbury Plain. The war with France filled his heart with melancholy forebodings. "The monuments and traces of antiquity, scattered in abundance over that region, led me unavoidably to compare what we know or guess of those remote times with certain aspects of modern society, and with calamities,

principally those consequent upon war, to which, more than other classes of men, the poor are subject. In these reflections, joined with particular facts that had come to my knowledge, the following stanzas originated.”—Advertisement, 1842. "All that relates to her [the Female Vagrant's] sufferings as a soldier's wife in America, and her condition of mind during her voyage home, were faithfully taken from the report made to me of her own case by a friend who had been subjected to the same trials and affected in the same way."-Fenwick note. The alterations of text are many and important, and will well repay study. Beside those made by Wordsworth from the point of view of poetic art, there are others the object of which seems to be to moderate the force of his indictment of society. In its first form the whole poem must have given expression to much of the writer's youthful Revolutionary sentiment.

PAGE 85.-Goody Blake, and Harry Gill.

Composed, 1798, at Alfoxden. The story was taken from Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia (vol. iv. pp. 68-69, ed. 1801), where we read as follows: "I received good

information of the truth of the following case, which was published a few years ago in the newspapers. A young farmer in Warwickshire, finding his hedges broke, and the sticks carried away during a frosty season, determined to watch for the thief. He lay many cold hours under a haystack, and at length an old woman, like a witch in a play, approached, and began to pull up the hedge; he waited till she had tied up her bottle of sticks, and was carrying them off, that he might convict her of the theft, and then springing from his concealment, he seized his prey with violent threats. After some altercation, in which her load was left upon the ground, she kneeled upon her bottle of sticks, and, raising her arms to Heaven beneath the bright moon then at the full, spoke to the farmer already shivering with cold, 'Heaven grant, that thou mayest never know again the blessing to be warm.' He complained of cold all the next day, and wore an upper coat, and in a few days another, and in a fortnight took to his bed, always saying nothing made him warm, he covered himself with many blankets, and had a sieve over his face, as he lay; and from this one insane idea he kept his bed above twenty years for fear of the cold air, till at length he died." The changes of