He left Gallow Hill “on March 13 in a violent storm of snow, wind, and rain,” and must have reached Keswick on Sunday the 14th or Monday the 15th of March. On the following Friday he walked over to Dove Cottage, and once more found himself in the presence of his friends, and, once again, their presence and companionship drove him into song. The Ode is at once a confession and a contrast, a confession that he had fled from the conflict with his soul into the fastnesses of metaphysics, and a contrast of his own hopelessness with the glad assurance of inward peace and outward happiness which attended the pure and manly spirit of his friend.
But verse was what he had been wedded to,
And his own mind did like a tempest strong
Come thus to him, and drove the weary wight along.
A MS. note-book of 1801-2, which has helped to date his movements at the time, contains, among other hints and jottings, the following almost illegible fragment: “The larches in spring push out their separate bundles of ... into green brushes or pencils which ... small tassels;”—and with the note may be compared the following lines included in the version contained in the letter, but afterwards omitted:—
In this heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
That pipes within the larch-tree, not unseen
The larch that pushes out in tassels green
Its bundled leafits—woo’d to mild delights,
By all the tender sounds and gentle sights
Of this sweet primrose-month, and vainly woo’d!
O dearest Poet, in this heartless mood—
Another jotting in the same note-book: “A Poem on the endeavour to emancipate the mind from day-dreams, with the different attempts and the vain ones,” perhaps found expression in the lines which follow “My shaping spirit of Imagination,” which appeared for the first time in print in Sibylline Leaves, 1817, but which, as Mr. Dykes Campbell has rightly divined, belonged to the original draft of the Ode. Poetical Works, p. 159. Appendix G, pp. 522-524. Editor’s Note, pp. 626-628.
[261] “A lovely skye-canoe.” Morning Post. The reference is to the Prologue to “Peter Bell.” Compare stanza 22,
“My little vagrant Form of light,
My gay and beautiful Canoe.”
Wordsworth’s Poetical Works, p. 100.
[262] For Southey’s reply, dated Bristol, August 4, 1802, see Life and Correspondence, ii. 189-192.
[263] The Right Hon. Isaac Corry, Chancellor of the Exchequer for Ireland, to whom Southey acted as secretary for a short time.