is probable, however, that stanzas i.—iv., which, according to the Fenwick Note, were written "two years at least" before the rest, date from the spring and early summer of 1802. On March 26, 1802, Dorothy's Journal records the writing of The Rainbow ("My heart leaps up,” etc.) and under the 27th the entry runs as follows: "A divine morning. At breakfast William wrote part of an Ode." Most likely the "Ode " here mentioned is that on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood—to quote the title which since 1815 this poem has always borne. Both "My heart leaps up " and the Ode deal with the self-same theme, viz., "the carrying on of the feelings of boyhood into mature years" (Dowden. See also the stanzas To the Cuckoo); indeed, from 1815 onward the three closing lines of "My heart," etc., replace Paulò majora canamus as motto of the Ode. (Observe, too, that in edd. 1815-1843 these two pieces respectively open and conclude the collective issue of Wordsworth's minor poems.) Again, in the Journal, June 17, 1802, we read: "William added a little to the Ode he is writing "-probably with reference to the Intimations, etc. Coleridge relates that during his visit to Rome (January-May, 1806) he recited this Ode to Baron W. von Humboldt, then Prussian Minister at the Papal Court (see the very interesting note on pp. 243-4, vol. iii., of The Friend, ed. 1818). If the Fenwick Note may be believed, Coleridge could not have carried abroad with him (April, 1804) a complete copy; but some unfinished draft may, as the late J. Dykes Campbell suggested, have been sent to him at Malta. "A four-years' darling" (1. 86) became, in 1815, "a six-years' " etc. After 1. 116 ("Which we are toiling all our lives to find; ") was inserted, in 1820, the line: "In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; " etc. The most important textual change was the omission, in 1820, of 11. 121-124: "To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight A place of thought where we in waiting lie;" The lines were cancelled in deference to Coleridge's trenchant criticism in the Biographia Literaria (ii., chap. ix., p. 160, ed. 1847). To his nephew the late Bishop of Lincoln, Wordsworth once observed: "In my Ode on the Intimations, etc., I do not profess to give a literal representation of the state of the affections and of the moral being in childhood. I record my own feelings at that time— my absolute spirituality, my all-soulness, if I may so speak. At that time I could not believe that I should lie down quietly in the grave, and that my body would moulder into dust." Oddly enough, his childish brain seems to have conceived of death as of a state of lying awake in the dark cold bed of the grave; nay, as man and woman he and Dorothy appear to have even luxuriated in what Coleridge deprecates as "a frightful notion" and "a horrible belief." See for example the sister's Journal under Monday, April 29, 1802: "We went to John's Grove, sate a while at first; afterwards William lay, and I lay, in the trench under the fence-he with his eyes shut, listening to the waterfalls and the birds. . . . We were unseen by one another. We thought that it would be so sweet thus to lie in the grave, to hear the peaceful sounds of the earth, and "the just to know that our dear friends were near." The thought which Dorothy here tells us was so sweet to her and William-that of lying awake and conscious of sound, etc., in the grave—is the same which the little girl in We are Seven is described as having so obstinately clung to regarding her dead brother and sister. Wordsworth loved to dilate upon perplexity and obscurity which in childhood attend our notion of death, or rather our utter inability to admit that notion." He drew thence-as, e. g., in these cancelled lines-an argument for the soul's immortality. "Of untam'd pleasures" (1. 126) became, in 1815, Of Heaven-born freedom." Lines 141, 142, in the same year, were rehandled thiswise: "Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, 66 With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:" and 1. 157 expanded, to the manifest improvement of the rhythm, as follows: "Uphold us- -cherish-and have power to make," etc. Lastly, in 1837, 1. 192 became : "Forbode not any severing," etc. The "fields of sleep" in 1. 28 are the west, those on which the sun has not yet risen, the time being morning (see 1. 44). Lines 71-76 are obscure. The youth travels further and further westward accompanied "by the vision splendid," and as he travels it fades into the light of day. Wordsworth's meaning cannot be ascertained unless we partially desert his imagery. He intended us simply to understand that as the youth travelled daily further and further from his infancy the vision faded. In illustration of ll. 145-152 ("those obstinate questionings Of sense," etc.) the late Sub-Dean of the Chapel Royal, Dublin (Rev. R. Perceval Graves, D.D.), observes: "I remember Mr. Wordsworth saying that, at a particular stage of his mental progress, he used to be frequently so rapt into an unreal transcendental world of ideas that the external world seemed no longer to exist in relation to him, and he had to reconvince himself of its existence by clasping a tree, or something that happened to be near him.” Cf. the Fenwick Note on the Ode, also Prof. Bonamy Price's letter to Prof. Knight (W. W.'s Poetical |