FOOTNOTES
[1] Quarterly Review, October, 1870, pp. 143, 144.
[2] Wordsworth, Preface to Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads.
[3] Myosotis Alpestris.
[4] S. T. Coleridge, Lit. Biog. vol. ii. p. 23.
[5] Since writing the above passage, I have been pleased to find in Mr. Hamerton’s Sylvan Year, the following passage, which expresses more fully the same thought. He speaks (page 68) of “the delight of the citizen in green leaves, and the intensity of sensation about Nature which we find in poets who were bred in towns; whilst those who have lived much in the country, though they know and observe more, seem to feel more equably, and to go to Nature with less of sensuous thirst and excitement.”
[6] Life of Sir Isaac Newton, by Sir David Brewster, vol. ii. pp. 407, 408.
[7] Mozley’s University Sermons, p. 141.
[8] See Müller’s Lectures on Language, 2d series, pp. 435, 436.
[9] Miss Wordsworth, p. 228.
[10] Essay on Keble.
[11] Trench on Parables, p. 13.
[12] Born 1621, died 1695.
[13] Dawson, Nature and the Bible, pp. 23, 24.
[14] Odyssey, B. vii. 112; Worsley, B. vii. 17th stanza.
[15] To this assertion I must make one exception. Since these remarks were written, my attention has been kindly drawn by Professor Campbell of St. Andrews to a passage in the ninth book of Paradise Lost, in which Milton for a moment reverts to the old rural freshness in something of the manner of his youth. It is the place where the Tempter first catches sight of Eve:—
“Much he the place admired, the person more.
As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer’s morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look seems all delight:
Such pleasure took the Serpent to behold
This flowery flat, the sweet recess of Eve
Thus early, thus alone.”
[16] From Dr. Clerk’s new translation of Ossian.
[17] How greatly to be desired is an edition of Wordsworth’s entire works, in which the poems should be printed in the exact chronological order of their composition, along with those notes on them which the poet dictated late in life. Such an arrangement of them is absolutely essential to a right understanding of their meaning, and those who desire to attain such an understanding are obliged to make the chronological arrangement for themselves, at great trouble, and at best very imperfectly. The time when such an edition can be made, with the fullest means for accuracy, is fast passing, if it is not already past. Is there no hope that those in whose hands the thing lies will still render this great and much-needed service to the great poet’s memory?