FOOTNOTES:

[41] In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from some village festival where he had danced all night:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly.
A dedicated Spirit.—Book IV.

[42] Prelude, Book II.

[43]

I to the muses have been bound,
These fourteen years, by strong indentures.
Idiot Boy (1798).

[44] Prelude, Book III.

[45] Prelude, Book VII. Written before 1805, and referring to a still earlier date.

[46] How far he swung backward toward the school under whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will show. The advocate of the language of common life has a verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist of Pope:

While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast.