His only visitants a straggling sheep, The stone-chat, or the sand-lark, restless bird, Piping along the margin of the lake....
—1815.
Here the "line quite alive" is gone—to be restored in deference, apparently, to Lamb's request. Another assonance is got rid of in the later editions, the "thistle thinly sprinkled o'er," and the passage now reads melodiously as follows:
His only visitants a straggling sheep. The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper: And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath, And juniper and thistle, sprinkled o'er, Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour A morbid pleasure nourished.
Wordsworth struck out many lines and stanzas in the course of his revisions, besides main passages of considerable length, as from the "Thanksgiving Ode" and the patriotic ode of January, 1816. These omissions are too long to quote here; but the following lines dropped from the ode on "Immortality" will have interest; they are not to be found, I think, in any English edition since that of 1815. Addressing the child over whom Immortality, in the language of the ode,
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, A Presence which is not to be put by—
this earlier reading continues:
To whom the grave Is but a lonely bed without the sense or sight Of day or the warm light: A place of thought where we in waiting lie.
Another notable omitted passage is the introduction to "Dion," published in 1816:
Fair is the Swan, whose majesty, prevailing O'er breezeless water on Locarno's lake....