'She came, no more a phantom to adorn
A moment, but an inmate of the heart,
And yet a spirit, there for me enshrined
To penetrate the lofty and the low;'
([Book xiv], l. 268).—Ed.
[return to footnote mark]
[Footnote B:] The poet expressly told me that these verses were on his wife.—H. C. R.
[return]
Note: It is not easy to say what were the "four lines composed as a part of the verses on the Highland Girl" which the Fenwick note tells us was "the germ of this poem." They may be lines now incorporated in those To a Highland Girl, vol. ii. p. 389, or they may be lines in the present poem, which Wordsworth wrote at first for the Highland Girl, but afterwards transferred to this one. They may have been the first four lines of the later poem. The two should be read consecutively, and compared.
After Wordsworth's death, a writer in the Daily News, January 1859—then understood to be Miss Harriet Martineau —wrote thus:
"In the Memoirs, by the nephew of the poet, it is said that these verses refer to Mrs. Wordsworth; but for half of Wordsworth's life it was always understood that they referred to some other phantom which 'gleamed upon his sight' before Mary Hutchinson."
This statement is much more than improbable; it is, I think, disproved by the Fenwick note. They cannot refer to the "Lucy" of the Goslar poems; and Wordsworth indicates, as plainly as he chose, to whom they actually do refer. Compare the Hon. Justice Coleridge's account of a conversation with Wordsworth (Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 306), in which the poet expressly said that the lines were written on his wife. The question was, however, set at rest in a conversation of Wordsworth with Henry Crabb Robinson, who wrote in his Diary on
"[May] 12 (1842).—Wordsworth said that the poems 'Our walk was far among the ancient trees' [vol. ii. p. 167], then 'She was a Phantom of delight,'[B] and finally the two sonnets To a Painter, should be read in succession as exhibiting the different phases of his affection to his wife."
(Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, vol. iii. p. 197.)
The use of the word "machine," in the third stanza of the poem, has been much criticised, but for a similar use of the term, see the sequel to [The Waggoner] (p. 107):
'Forgive me, then; for I had been
On friendly terms with this Machine.'
See also Hamlet (act II. scene ii. l. 124):