"To obviate some distraction in the minds of those who are well acquainted with Salisbury Plain, it may be proper to say, that of the features described as belonging to it, one or two are taken from other desolate parts of England."[15]
"pencil and note-book, and jots down whatever strikes him most," adding, "Nature does not permit an inventory to be made of her charms! He should have left his pencil and note-book at home; fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and enjoy. Afterwards he would have discovered that while much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was also most wisely obliterated. That which remained, the picture surviving in his mind, would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so in large part by discarding much which, though in itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene, many of the most brilliant details are but accidental."
in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara's inmost caves,
the gleam,
The light that never was, on sea or land,
The consecration, and the Poet's dream.
"In these days, when a great man's path to posterity is likely to be more and more crowded, there is a tendency to create an obstruction, in the desire to give an impulse. To gather about a man's work all the details that can be found out about it is, in my opinion, to put a drag upon it; and, as of the Works, so of the Life."
"I question whether by reading everything which he gives us, we are so likely to acquire an admiring sense, even of his variety and abundance, as by reading what he gives us at his happier moments. Receive him absolutely without omission and compromise, follow his whole outpouring, stanza by stanza, and line by line, from the very commencement to the very end, and he is capable of being tiresome."[18]
Among all lovely things my Love had been,
- As already explained, those fragments of The Recluse—which were issued in all the earlier volumes, and afterwards incorporated in The Prelude—are printed as they originally appeared.
- Short Notes are extracted from Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland (1803), which illustrate the Poems composed during that Tour, while the whole text of that Tour will be printed in full in subsequent volumes.
- Other fragments, including the lines beginning,
Wisdom and Spirit of the universe,
A detail, perhaps not too trivial to mention, is that, in this edition—at the suggestion of several friends —I have followed the example of Professor Dowden in his Aldine edition, and numbered the lines of almost all the poems—even the sonnets.