And lastly, I may mention one or two changes of text which Wordsworth did not make, but which belong to the class for which careless editors or proofreaders are responsible. An edition well known to the American public is especially peccant in this respect; that beautiful line, for instance, in "The Pet Lamb"—
And that green corn all day is rustling in thy ears,
becomes,
That green cord all day is rustling in thy ears.
And here is a really interesting erratum; it occurs in the poem of "The Idiot Boy," where it has stood unnoticed for twenty years and more. Wordsworth's stanzas, describing the boy's night-long ride under the moon, "from eight o'clock till five," hearing meanwhile "the owls in tuneful concert strive," originally put these words into his mouth, the actual words of his hero, as Wordsworth tells us in a note:
The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Sun did shine so cold, Thus answered Johnny in his glory.
But this reading puzzled the proofreader. How could the sun shine at night? This being clearly impossible, he restored the idiot boy to partial sanity. He made him say:
The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Moon did shine so cold;
and the only wonder is that he did not also read,
The cocks did crow cock-a-doodle-doo.