1808
The poems referring to Coleorton are all transferred to the year 1807, and The Force of Prayer was written in that year. Those composed in 1808 were few in number. With the exception of The White Doe of Rylstone—to which additions were made in that year—they include only the two sonnets Composed while the Author was engaged in writing a Tract, occasioned by the Convention of Cintra, and the fragment on George and Sarah Green. The latter poem Wordsworth gave to De Quincey, who published it in his "Recollections of Grasmere," which appeared in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine in September 1839; but it never found a place in any edition of Wordsworth's own poems. In this edition it is printed in the appendix to volume viii.
The reasons which have led me to assign [The White Doe of Rylstone] to the year 1808, are stated in a note to the poem (see [p. 191]). I infer that it was practically finished in April 1808, because Dorothy Wordsworth, in a letter to Lady Beaumont, dated April 20, 1808, says, "The poem is to be published. Longman has consented—in spite of the odium under which my brother labours as a poet—to give him 100 guineas for 1000 copies, according to his demand." She gives no indication of the name of the poem referred to. As it must, however, have been one which was to be published separately, she can only refer to [The White Doe] or to The Excursion; but the latter poem was not finished in 1808.
It is probable, from the remark made in a subsequent letter to Lady Beaumont, February 1810, that Wordsworth intended either to add to what he had written in 1808, or to alter some passages before publication; or by "completing" the poem, he may have meant simply adding the Dedication, which was not written till 1815.
All things considered, it seems the best arrangement that the poems of 1808 should begin with [The White Doe of Rylstone]. In the year 1891 I edited this poem for the Clarendon Press. A few additional details have come to light since then, and are introduced into the notes. S. T. Coleridge's criticism of the poem in Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. chap. xxii. p. 176 (edition 1817), should be consulted.—Ed.