The tenderest mood Of that man's mind, what can it be?
In "The Nightingale" Wordsworth first called that bird "a creature of a fiery heart"; but in the edition of 1815 it became "a creature of ebullient heart," a flat disenchantment of the verse. The change was questioned from the first, as Crabb Robinson tells us, and in later editions the first reading was restored. A fortunate correction made in the same edition was retained—the change of "laughing company" to "jocund company," in "The Daffodils":
A poet could not but be gay In such a jocund company.
—1815.
The poem "Rural Architecture," in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800, was curtailed of its closing stanza in the edition of 1815:
Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works In Paris and London, 'mong Christians and Turks, Spirits busy to do and undo, etc., etc.
But in Lamb's correspondence of the same year he complains to Wordsworth that the omission "leaves it [the poem] in my mind less complete," and the lines were restored in the later editions. Not to differ hastily with Lamb, the lines yet seem lines to be spared. In the same sentence he complains that in the new edition there is another "admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat, and the glancing sandpiper,' which was a line quite alive. I demand these at your hand." Wordsworth restored the line, and the three versions of the passage are worth comparison. It is from the "Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree," and describes a wanderer in the solitude of the country:
His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper: And on these barren rocks, with juniper, And heath, and thistle, thinly sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished.
—"Lyrical Ballads."
In the second reading he corrects a bad assonance thus: