Wordsworth sent this fragment in MS. to Coleridge, who was then living at Ratzeburg, and Coleridge wrote in reply on the 10th Dec. 1798:
"The blank lines gave me as much direct pleasure as was possible in the general bustle of pleasure with which I received and read your letter. I observed, I remember, that the 'fingers woven,' etc., only puzzled me; and though I liked the twelve or fourteen first lines very well, yet I liked the remainder much better. Well, now I have read them again, they are very beautiful, and leave an affecting impression. That
I should have recognised anywhere; and had I met these lines, running wild in the deserts of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out 'Wordsworth'!"'uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake,'
'uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake,'
The MS. copy of this poem sent to Coleridge probably lacked the explanatory line,
'Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth,'
as another MS., in the possession of the poet's grandson, lacks it; and the line was possibly added—as the late Mr. Dykes Campbell suggested—"in deference to S. T. C.'s expression of puzzlement."
Fletcher [Raincock—an] elder brother of the William Raincock referred to in the Fenwick note to this poem, as Wordsworth's schoolfellow at Hawkshead—was with him also at Cambridge. He attended Pembroke College, and was second wrangler in 1790[B]. John Fleming of Rayrigg, his half-brother—the boy with whom Wordsworth used to walk round the lake of Esthwaite, in the morning before school-time, ("five miles of pleasant wandering")—was also at St. John's College, Cambridge, at this time, and had been fifth Wrangler in the preceding year, 1789. He is referred to both in the second and the fifth books of The Prelude (see notes to that poem). It is perhaps not unworthy of note that Wrangham, whose French stanzas on "The Birth of Love" Wordsworth translated into English, was in the same year—1789—third Wrangler, second Smith's prizeman, and first Chancellor's medallist; while Robert Greenwood, "the Minstrel of the Troop," who "blew his flute, alone upon the rock" in Windermere,—also one of the characters referred to in the second book of The Prelude,—was sixteenth Wrangler in Wordsworth's year, viz. 1791. William Raincock was at St. John's College, Cambridge.—Ed.