Wordsworth dated the former of these poems 1786, but I do not believe that he wrote that poem, and still less that he wrote “Calm is all nature,” etc., as we now have it, in that year. Doubtless he wrote verses on these two subjects; but the best evidence against the notion that the text, as we now have it, was written in 1786, is this 1787 sonnet on Miss Maria Williams. It is not only dated authoritatively, but it was published in 1787; and therefore serves (as nothing else can until we come to 1793) as evidence in regard to the development of his poetic power. The translation of Francis Wrangham’s lines—which he called The Birth of Love—in 1795, is further evidence in the same direction. No doubt there were many poor poetic utterances by Wordsworth later in life—failures in his manhood, as dismal as the “Walford Tragedy” was in his youth—but I think that the Lines written in very early Youth, and the Extract from the Poem composed in anticipation of leaving School, were rehandled by him, and the text greatly improved before they were first published. The late Mr. J. Dykes Campbell wrote to me in 1892: “Poets tell dreadful fibs about their early verses—as witness S.T.C. who declared he wrote The Advent of Love at fifteen! I know he didn’t, and am going to print one or two of his prize school verses of that age, which I have found in his own fifteen-year-old fist.”—Ed.
[338] I should add, in a footnote, that I have no knowledge of the source whence Mr. Campbell derived this; but I am sure that it must have reached him from an authentic one.—Ed.
LINES WRITTEN BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH AS A SCHOOL EXERCISE AT HAWKSHEAD, ANNO ÆTATIS 14
In the “Autobiographical Memoranda”—dictated at Rydal Mount in 1847—Wordsworth said, “The first verses which I wrote were a task imposed by my master: the subject The Summer Vacation, and of my own accord I added others upon Return to School. There was nothing remarkable in either poem; but I was called upon, among other scholars, to write verses upon the completion of the second century from the foundation of the school in 1585, by Archbishop Sandys. These verses were much admired, far more than they deserved, for they were but a tame imitation of Pope’s versification, and a little in his style. This exercise, however, put it into my head to compose verses from the impulse of my own mind; and I wrote, while yet a schoolboy, a long poem running upon my own adventures, and the scenery of the county in which I was brought up.”
The Summer Vacation, and the Return to School, were destroyed by Wordsworth.—Ed.
And has the Sun his flaming chariot driven
Two hundred times around the ring of heaven,
Since Science first, with all her sacred train,
Beneath yon roof began her heavenly reign?