[Footnote D:]

"In Chaucer's poem, after 'the cuckoo, bird unholy,' has said his evil say, the Nightingale breaks forth 'so lustily,'

'That with her clere voys she made rynge
Thro out alle the grene wode wide,'

Wordsworth has taken a poet's licence with these lines:

'I heard the lusty Nightingale so sing,
That her clear voice made a loud rioting,
Echoing through all the green wood wide.'

This 'loud rioting' is Wordsworth's, not Chaucer's; and it belongs, as it were, to that other passage of his:

'O Nightingale, thou surely art
A creature of a fiery heart,
These notes of thine—they pierce and pierce;
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
Had helped thee to a Valentine.'"

'That with her clere voys she made rynge
Thro out alle the grene wode wide,'

'I heard the lusty Nightingale so sing,
That her clear voice made a loud rioting,
Echoing through all the green wood wide.'

'O Nightingale, thou surely art
A creature of a fiery heart,
These notes of thine—they pierce and pierce;
Tumultuous harmony and fierce!
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine
Had helped thee to a Valentine.'"

(Professor Dowden, in the Transactions of the Wordsworth Society, No. III.)—Ed.

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[Footnote E:]

From a manuscript in the Bodleian, as are also stanzas 44 and 45— W. W. (1841),

which are necessary to complete the sense—W. W. (added in 1842).