Here nineteen lines full of beauty are sacrificed by Wordsworth in the interest of the unity of the poem. He struck out, too, some lines from "The Daisy," "The Thorn," and "Simon Lee," and eight stanzas have disappeared from "Peter Bell" since the first edition of that poem. Among them are these grotesque lines, favorites with Charles Lamb:
Is it a party in a parlour? Cramm'd just as they on earth were cramm'd— Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, All silent and all damn'd!
And here are some verses that have interest from the glimpse they give of Wordsworth's faculty in a field that he declined to cultivate—the amatory or "fleshly," as it has been conveniently named for us of late. I quote from that rare book, the "Descriptive Sketches" of 1793; and as the lines are not included in any edition of his poems, they are unfamiliar to most readers. But two copies of this book, so far as I know, exist in this country. One of them, which belonged to the late Prof. Henry Reed, Wordsworth's American editor, is full of corrections in Wordsworth's own handwriting; and it is by the courtesy of its present owner that I am enabled to give here the early text with these corrections, never before printed. The young Wordsworth takes leave of Switzerland, at the conclusion of his pedestrian tour, with this glowing apostrophe:
ye the Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade your Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, Dark Those stedfast eyes, that beating breasts inspire, To throw the "sultry rays" of young Desire; soft Those lips whose ^ tides of fragrance come and go Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; Ye warm Those shadowy breasts In love's soft light array'd And rising by the moon of passion sway'd."[G]
Wordsworth thus dropped, for one reason or another, many passages from his poems. But did he abandon entire poems? That did not often happen. He strove patiently to perfect the form of his thought; but he was unwilling to let the substance of it go. In the seven volumes of his poetry, as they now stand, but two poems are lacking, to the best of my knowledge, of all that he ever published. One of these, an unimportant piece beginning, "The confidence of youth our only art," was printed with the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent" (1822), and no longer appears in the collected editions. The other missing poem, "Andrew Jones," was abandoned for reasons, as I think, of considerable critical interest. In the "Lyrical Ballads" it began thus:
I hate that Andrew Jones: he'll breed His children up to waste and pillage: I wish the press-gang or the drum With its tantara sound would come, And sweep him from the village!
This poem may be found (with, slight emendations) as late as the edition of 1815; but after that date I meet with it nowhere but in foreign reprints. Why was it dropped? It is doubtless a story of unrelieved though petty suffering; it corresponds, in small, to what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls the "poetically faulty" situation of Empedocles, a situation "in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done." But, on the other hand, that fragment of Æschylus, the "Prometheus Bound," in which everything is endured and nothing done, yet remains a work of the deepest interest: nor need we think that Wordsworth abandoned his little poem for a reason so refined as that which led Mr. Arnold to abandon one of his own. There was, as I take it, a moral reason which led to Wordsworth's decision; namely, that the story of "Andrew Jones" is told with bitterness of feeling from beginning to end; and against bitterness of feeling Wordsworth had recorded, during his earlier years, a striking protest. We shall read it presently; but first let us couple with the poem a sentence from his prose—a sentence full of the same feeling, and which was early dropped for the same reason. We shall find it in the edition of 1815, in the essay supplementary to the famous Preface of that date. There Wordsworth turns upon his critics as follows:
"By what fatality the orb of my genius (for genius none of them seem to deny me) acts upon these men like the moon upon a certain description of patients, it would be irksome to enquire: nor would it consist with the respect which I owe myself to take further notice of opponents whom I internally despise."
This is not quite in the vein of the serenely meditative poet; and if we look back to a time twenty years earlier than this, we shall find that Wordsworth had reproved his heat beforehand. In 1795, when he first chose definitely the poet's career, he had written these lines:
If thou be one whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure, Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know that pride, Howe'er disguised in its own majesty, Is littleness: that he who feels contempt For any living thing, hath faculties Which he has never used: that thought with him Is in its infancy.