Some one proposes, I believe, a similar emendation in "As You Like It," intending to make the Duke speak better sense than Shakespeare put into his mouth. He is to say,
Sermons in books. Stones in the running brooks, and good in everything.
But while in the main the text of Shakespeare is bettering under criticism, Wordsworth is suffering miscorrection; and for the good that he has to give us we cannot quite dispense with the original editions.
Titus Munson Coan.
[B] After the early poems just mentioned and the "Lyrical Ballads," 1798 to 1802, the chief editions to be consulted for the changes of text are the complete editions of 1807, 1815, and 1836, and the original issues of "The Excursion" (1814), of "The White Doe of Rylston" (1815), of "Peter Bell," and of "The Waggoner" (1819). Unfortunately I have not been able to get access to Mr. W. Johnston's useful collection of Wordsworth's "Earlier Poems" (London, 1857): it would have lightened the task of collecting the variantes, the more important of which, for the period covered by the collection, are given in it. But, having gone in nearly every case to the original texts, I need hardly say that I have been careful to quote them accurately in the present article.
[ [C]"Prose Works," III., 302.
[D]"The Dial," Vol. III., p. 514.
[ [E]"Prose Works," III., 381.
[ [F]"Edinburgh Review," October, 1807.
[ [G]I venture to note, in passing, a small class of corrections in which the poet has cleared his text from certain innocencies of expression that were liable to be misread by persons on the alert for double meanings. The following are among the Wordsworthian simplicities that have been amended in the later editions; the reference is made to the octavos of 1815, which may be compared with any of the editions since 1836: