"Leaving our woods and mountains for the plains
Of treeless level Granta." (p. 103.)
...
"'Twas then the time
When in two camps, like Pope and Emperor,
Byron and Wordsworth parted Granta's sons." (p. 121.)
Ed.
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[Footnote B:] Note the meaning, as well as the curiosa felicitas, of this phrase.—Ed.
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[Footnote C:] His Cambridge studies were very miscellaneous, partly owing to his strong natural disinclination to work by rule, partly to unmethodic training at Hawkshead, and to the fact that he had already mastered so much of Euclid and Algebra as to have a twelvemonth's start of the freshmen of his year.
"Accordingly," he tells us, "I got into rather an idle way, reading nothing but Classic authors, according to my fancy, and Italian poetry. As I took to these studies with much interest my Italian master was proud of the progress I made. Under his correction I translated the Vision of Mirza, and two or three other papers of the Spectator into Italian."
Speaking of her brother Christopher, then at Cambridge, Dorothy Wordsworth wrote thus in 1793:
"He is not so ardent in any of his pursuits as William is, but he is yet particularly attached to the same pursuits which have so irresistible an influence over William, and deprive him of the power of chaining his attention to others discordant to his feelings."
Ed.
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[Footnote D:] April 1804.—Ed.
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[Footnote E:] There is no ash tree now in the grove of St. John's College, Cambridge, and no tradition as to where it stood. Covered as it was—trunk and branch—with "clustering ivy" in 1787, it survived till 1808 at any rate. See [Note IV.] in the [a]return]
[Footnote F:] See notes [[1] and [2]] on pp. 210 and 223.—Ed.
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[Footnote G:] Before leaving Hawkshead he had mastered five books of Euclid, and in Algebra, simple and quadratic equations. See [note], p. 223.—Ed.
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[Footnote H:] Compare the second stanza of the Ode to Lycoris:
'Then, Twilight is preferred to Dawn,
And Autumn to the Spring.'
Ed.
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[Footnote I:] Thomson. See the Castle of Indolence, canto I. stanza xv.—Ed.
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[Footnote K:] Dovedale, a rocky chasm, rather more than two miles long, not far from Ashburn, in Derbyshire. Thomas Potts writes of it thus:
"The rugged, dissimilar, and frequently grotesque and fanciful appearance of the rocks distinguish the scenery of this valley from perhaps every other in the kingdom. In some places they shoot up in detached masses, in the form of spires or conical pyramids, to the height of 30 or 40 yards.... One rock, distinguished by the name of the Pike, from its spiry form and situation in the midst of the stream, was noticed in the second part of The Complete Angler, by Charles Cotton," etc. etc.
(The Beauties of England and Wales, Derbyshire, vol. iii, pp. 425, 426, and 431. London, 1810.) Potts speaks of the "pellucid waters" of the Dove. "It is transparent to the bottom." (See Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, p. 114.)—Ed.
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[Footnote L:] Doubtless Wharfedale, Wensleydale, and Swaledale.—Ed.
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[Footnote M:] Compare Paradise Lost, v. 310, and in Chapman's Blind Beggar of Alexandria: