Is there not some loss of vividness here? The later reading is perhaps the more graceful, and yet the picture seems to me brighter in the early version. This, too, seems a doubtful improvement; it occurs in "The Farmer of Tilsbury Vale." Wordsworth wrote at first:
His staff is a sceptre—his gray hairs a crown: Erect as a sunflower he stands, and the streak Of the unfaded rose is expressed on his cheek.
—1815.
In later editions we read:
His bright eyes look brighter, set off by the streak Of the unfaded rose that still blooms on his cheek.
Here the last line is bettered; but I, for one, am sorry to lose the sunflower comparison; it is picturesque, and it aptly describes this hearty child of the earth.
Look now at the poem "We are Seven," as it began in the "Lyrical Ballads":
A simple child, dear brother Jim, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb— What should it know of death?
It is now sixty years since "dear brother Jim" was dismissed from his place in these lines—dismissed, perhaps, with the less compunction because the stanza was written by another hand—Coleridge's—as an introduction to the rest of the poem. But I think the lines were better as the young poets first sent them forth. "Brother Jim" had, perhaps, no clearly demonstrable business in the poem; and yet, having been there, we miss him now that he is gone. That homely apostrophe had in it the primitive impulses of the Lake school feeling; the phrase refuses to be forgotten, and seems to have a persistent life of its own. I have seen the missing words restored, in pencil marks, to their rightful place in the text of copies belonging to old-fashioned gentlemen who remembered the original reading. Nor can we easily deny existence to our "dear brother Jim"; his name still lingers in our memories, haunting about the page from which it was excluded long ago; he lives, and deserves to live, as the symbol of immortal fraternity.
But as I have said, Wordsworth mended his text oftener than he marred it, and first by refining upon his descriptions of outward nature. Among the cases in point, one occurs in a poem entitled "Influences of Natural objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood and early Youth"—a cumbrous heading enough. May I digress for a moment upon the unlucky titles which Wordsworth so often prefixed to his poems, and the improvements occasionally made in them? Surely a less convenient caption than the one just quoted is not often met with, or a less attractive one than this other, prefixed to an inscription not very many times longer than itself: