The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III, by William Wordsworth This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III Author: William Wordsworth Release Date: May 19, 2004 [EBook #12383] Language: English Character set encoding: ASCII *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WILLIAM WORDSWORTH POETRY, III *** Produced by Jonathon Ingram, Clytie Siddall and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team! THE POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH EDITED BY WILLIAM KNIGHT VOL. III 1896 CONTENTS 1804 "She was a Phantom of delight" "I wandered lonely as a cloud" The Affliction of Margaret-- The Forsaken Repentance Address to my Infant Daughter, Dora The Kitten and Falling Leaves The Small Celandine At Applethwaite, near Keswick Vaudracour and Julia 1805 French Revolution Ode to Duty To a Sky-Lark Fidelity Incident characteristic of a Favourite Dog Tribute to the Memory of the same Dog To the Daisy (#4) Elegiac Stanzas Elegiac Verses "When, to the attractions of the busy world" The Cottager to her Infant The Waggoner The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind From the Italian of Michael Angelo From the Same From the Same. To the Supreme Being APPENDICES I II III IV V VI VII WORDSWORTH'S POETICAL WORKS 1804 The poems written in 1804 were not numerous; and, with the exception of 'The Small Celandine', the stanzas beginning "I wandered lonely as a cloud," and "She was a Phantom of delight," they were less remarkable than those of the two preceding, and the three following years. Wordsworth's poetical activity in 1804 is not recorded, however, in Lyrical Ballads or Sonnets, but in 'The Prelude', much of which was thought out, and afterwards dictated to Dorothy or Mary Wordsworth, on the terrace walk of Lancrigg during that year; while the 'Ode, Intimations of Immortality' was altered and added to, although it did not receive its final form till 1806. In the sixth book of 'The Prelude', p. 222, the lines occur: 'Four years and thirty, told this very week, Have I been now a sojourner on earth.' That part of the great autobiographical poem must therefore have been composed in April, 1804.--Ed. * * * * * "SHE WAS A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT" Composed 1804.--Published 1807 [Written at Town-end, Grasmere. The germ of this poem was four lines composed as a part of the verses on the 'Highland Girl'. Though beginning in this way, it was written from my heart, as is sufficiently obvious.--I. F.] One of the "Poems of the Imagination."--Ed. She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleamed upon my sight; [A] A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament; Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair; 5 Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn; [1] A dancing Shape, an Image gay, To haunt, to startle, and way-lay. 10 I saw her upon nearer view, A Spirit, yet a Woman too! Her household motions light and free, And steps of virgin-liberty; A countenance in which did meet 15 Sweet record>

Buy this Reference Manual in softcover from Barnes & Noble!

Additional languages

Additional formats

Subscribe to the monthly
MySQL Newsletter!

20.2.3.26 mysql_get_host_info()

char *mysql_get_host_info(MYSQL *mysql)

Description

Returns a string describing the type of connection in use, including the server hostname.

Return Values

A character string representing the server hostname and the connection type.

Errors

None.




seemed to have a dead weight about it,—the reality so far short of the expectation. It was the first long labour that I had finished; and the doubt whether I should ever live to write The Recluse, and the sense which I had of this poem being so far below what I seemed capable of executing, depressed me much; above all, many heavy thoughts of my poor departed brother hung upon me, the joy which I should have had in showing him the manuscript, and a thousand other vain fancies and dreams. I have spoken of this, because it was a state of feeling new to me, the occasion being new. This work may be considered as a sort of portico to The Recluse, part of the same building, which I hope to be able, ere long, to begin with in earnest; and if I am permitted to bring it to a conclusion, and to write, further, a narrative poem of the epic kind, I shall consider the task of my life as over. I ought to add, that I have the satisfaction of finding the present poem not quite of so alarming a length as I apprehended." These letters explain the delay in the publication of The Prelude. They show that what led Wordsworth to write so much about himself was not self-conceit, but self-diffidence. He felt unprepared as yet for the more arduous task he had set before himself. He saw its faults as clearly, or more clearly, than the critics who condemned him. He knew that its length was excessive. He tried to condense it; he kept it beside him unpublished, and occasionally revised it, with a view to condensation, in vain. The text received his final corrections in the year 1832.

Wordsworth's reluctance to publish these portions of his great poem, The Recluse, other than The Excursion, during his lifetime, was a matter of surprise to his friends; to whom he, or the ladies of his household, had read portions of it. In the year 1819, Charles Lamb wrote to him,
"If, as you say, The Waggoner, in some sort, came at my call, oh for a potent voice to call forth The Recluse from his profound dormitory, where he sleeps forgetful of his foolish charge—the world!"
(The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. ii. p. 26.)

The admission made in the letter of May 1st, 1805, is note-worthy:
"This defect" (of redundancy) "whenever I have suspected it or found it to exist in any writings of mine, I have always found incurable. The fault lies too deep, and is in the first conception."
The actual result—in the Poem he had at length committed to writing—was so far inferior to the ideal he had tried to realise, that he could never be induced to publish it. He spoke of the MS. as forming a sort of portico to his larger work—the poem on Man, Nature, and Society—which he meant to call The Recluse, and of which one portion only, viz. The Excursion, was finished. It is clear that throughout the composition of The Prelude, he felt that he was experimenting with his powers. He wished to find out whether he could construct "a literary work that might live," on a larger scale than his Lyrics; and it was on the writing of a "philosophical poem," dealing with Man and Nature, in their deepest aspects, that his thoughts had been fixed for many years. From the letter to Sir George Beaumont, December 25, 1804, it is evident that he regarded the autobiographical poem as a mere prologue to this larger work, to which he hoped to turn "with all his might" after The Prelude was finished, and of which he had already written about a fifth or a sixth (see Memoirs, vol. i. p. 304). This was the part known in the Grasmere household as "The Pedlar," a title given to it from the character of the Wanderer, but afterwards happily set aside. He did not devote himself, however, to the completion of his wider purpose, immediately after The Prelude was finished. He wrote one book of The Recluse which he called "Home at Grasmere"; and, though detached from The Prelude, it is a continuation of the narrative of his own life at the point where it is left off in the latter poem. It consists of 733 lines. Two extracts from it were published in the Memoirs of Wordsworth in 1851 (vol. i. pp. 151 and 155), beginning [Volume 2 links:],
'On Nature's invitation do I come,'
and
'Bleak season was it, turbulent and bleak.'
These will be found in vol. ii. of this edition, pp. 118 and 121 respectively.

The autobiographical poem remained, as already stated, during Wordsworth's lifetime without a title. The name finally adopted—The Prelude—was suggested by Mrs. Wordsworth, both to indicate its relation to the larger work, and the fact of its having been written comparatively early.

As the poem was addressed to Coleridge, it may be desirable to add in this place his critical verdict upon it; along with the poem which he wrote, on hearing Wordsworth read a portion of it to him, in the winter of 1806, at Coleorton.

In his Table Talk (London, 1835, vol. ii. p. 70), Coleridge's opinion is recorded thus:
"I cannot help regretting that Wordsworth did not first publish his thirteen (fourteen) books on the growth of an individual mind—superior, as I used to think, upon the whole to The Excursion. You may judge how I felt about them by my own Poem upon the occasion. Then the plan laid out, and, I believe, partly suggested by me, was, that Wordsworth should assume the station of a man in mental repose, one whose principles were made up, and so prepared to deliver upon authority a system of philosophy. He was to treat man as man,—a subject of eye, ear, touch, and taste in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out of the senses; then he was to describe the pastoral and other states of society, assuming something of the Juvenalian spirit as he approached the high civilisation of cities and towns, and opening a melancholy picture of the present state of degeneracy and vice; thence he was to infer and reveal the proof of, and necessity for, the whole state of man and society being subject to, and illustrative of a redemptive process in operation, showing how this idea reconciled all the anomalies, and promised future glory and restoration. Something of this sort was, I think, agreed on. It is, in substance, what I have been all my life doing in my system of philosophy.

"I think Wordsworth possessed more of the genius of a great Philosopher than any man I ever knew, or, as I believe, has existed in England since Milton; but it seems to me that he ought never to have abandoned the contemplative position which is peculiarly—perhaps, I might say exclusively—fitted for him. His proper title is Spectator ab extra."
The following are Coleridge's Lines addressed to Wordsworth:
To William Wordsworth

Composed on the Night after his Recitation of a Poem on rhe Growth of an Individual Mind


Friend of the wise! and teacher of the good!
Into my heart have I received that lay
More than historic, that prophetic lay
Wherein (high theme by thee first sung aright)
Of the foundations and the building up
Of a Human Spirit thou hast dared to tell
What may be told, to the understanding mind
Revealable; and what within the mind
By vital breathings secret as the soul
Of vernal growth, oft quickens in the heart
Thoughts all too deep for words!—
        Theme hard as high,
Of smiles spontaneous, and mysterious fears
(The first-born they of Reason and twin-birth),
Of tides obedient to external force,
And currents self-determined, as might seem,
Or by some inner power; of moments awful,
Now in thy inner life, and now abroad,
When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received
The Light reflected, as a light bestowed—
Of fancies fair, and milder hours of youth,
Hyblean murmurs of poetic thought
Industrious in its joy, in vales and glens,
Native or outland, lakes and famous hills!
Or on the lonely high-road, when the stars
Were rising; or by secret mountain-streams,
The guides and the companions of thy way!
Of more than Fancy, of the Social Sense
Distending wide, and man beloved as man,
Where France in all her towns lay vibrating
Like some becalmed bark beneath the burst
Of Heaven's immediate thunder, when no cloud
Is visible, or shadow on the main.
For thou wert there, thine own brows garlanded,
Amid the tremor of a realm aglow,
Amid a mighty nation jubilant,
When from the general heart of humankind
Hope sprang forth like a full-born Deity!
—Of that dear Hope afflicted and struck down,
So summoned homeward, thenceforth calm and sure,
From the dread watch-tower of man's absolute self,
With light unwaning on her eyes, to look
Far on—herself a glory to behold.
The Angel of the vision! Then (last strain)
Of Duty, chosen laws controlling choice,
Action and joy!—An Orphic song indeed,
A song divine of high and passionate thoughts
To their own music chanted!
            O great Bard!
Ere yet that last strain dying awed the air,
With stedfast eye I viewed thee in the choir
Of ever-enduring men. The truly great
Have all one age, and from one visible space
Shed influence! They, both in power and act,
Are permanent, and Time is not with them,
Save as it worketh for them, they in it.
Nor less a sacred roll, than those of old,
And to be placed, as they, with gradual fame
Among the archives of mankind, thy work
Makes audible a linked lay of Truth,
Of Truth profound a sweet continuous lay,
Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes!
Ah! as I listened with a heart forlorn,
The pulses of my being beat anew:
And even as life returns upon the drowned,
Life's joy rekindling roused a throng of pains—
Keen pangs of Love, awakening as a babe
Turbulent, with an outcry in the heart;
And fears self-willed, that shunned the eye of hope;
And hope that scarce would know itself from fear;
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given, and knowledge won in vain;
And all which I had culled in wood-walks wild,
And all which patient toil had reared, and all,
Commune with thee had opened out—but flowers
Strewed on my corse, and borne upon my bier,
In the same coffin, for the self-same grave!

... Eve following eve,
Dear tranquil time, when the sweet sense of Home
Is sweetest! moments for their own sake hailed,
And more desired, more precious for thy song,
In silence listening, like a devout child,
My soul lay passive, by thy various strain
Driven as in surges now beneath the stars,
With momentary stars of my own birth,
Fair constellated foam, [C] still darting off
Into the darkness; now a tranquil sea,
Outspread and bright, yet swelling to the moon.

And when—O Friend! my comforter and guide!
Strong in thyself, and powerful to give strength!—
Thy long-sustained Song finally closed,
And thy deep voice had ceased—yet thou thyself
Wert still before my eyes, and round us both
That happy vision of beloved faces—
Scarce conscious, and yet conscious of its close
I sate, my being blended in one thought
(Thought was it? or aspiration? or resolve?)
Absorbed, yet hanging still upon the sound—
And when I rose I found myself in prayer.
It was at Coleorton, in Leicestershire,—where the Wordsworths lived during the winter of 1806-7, in a farm-house belonging to Sir George Beaumont, and where Coleridge visited them,—that The Prelude was read aloud by its author, on the occasion which gave birth to these lines.—Ed.


Contents—The Prelude
Main Contents



Book First

Introduction:—Childhood and School-Time


text variant footnote line number
O there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about; and should the chosen guide
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again!
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturbed delight
Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn,
By road or pathway, or through trackless field,
Up hill or down, or shall some floating thing
Upon the river point me out my course?

Dear Liberty! Yet what would it avail
But for a gift that consecrates the joy?
For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven
Was blowing on my body, felt within
A correspondent breeze, that gently moved
With quickening virtue, but is now become
A tempest, a redundant energy,
Vexing its own creation. Thanks to both,
And their congenial powers, that, while they join
In breaking up a long-continued frost,
Bring with them vernal promises, the hope
Of active days urged on by flying hours,—
Days of sweet leisure, taxed with patient thought
Abstruse, nor wanting punctual service high,
Matins and vespers of harmonious verse!

Thus far, O Friend! did I, not used to make
A present joy the matter of a song,
Pour forth that day my soul in measured strains
That would not be forgotten, and are here
Recorded: to the open fields I told
A prophecy: poetic numbers came
Spontaneously to clothe in priestly robe
A renovated spirit singled out,
Such hope was mine, for holy services.
My own voice cheered me, and, far more, the mind's
Internal echo of the imperfect sound;
To both I listened, drawing from them both
A cheerful confidence in things to come.

Content and not unwilling now to give
A respite to this passion, I paced on
With brisk and eager steps; and came, at length,
To a green shady place, where down I sate
Beneath a tree, slackening my thoughts by choice,
And settling into gentler happiness.
'Twas autumn, and a clear and placid day,
With warmth, as much as needed, from a sun
Two hours declined towards the west; a day
With silver clouds, and sunshine on the grass,
And in the sheltered and the sheltering grove
A perfect stillness. Many were the thoughts
Encouraged and dismissed, till choice was made
Of a known Vale, whither my feet should turn,
Nor rest till they had reached the very doo^. Qet$r:Աks:,۞- $AU:)^5I$YjzXf9dN|aSdoG=*t/C~S+pY6fa=g٧rBMc]2f^Vh$G[o^g$cMb"uQ/ASZ%w焠9-W4;3}k0lA`A8;eʤ3X\T.9]͂^D},u"Rԗʪx[wx]P28blB ɒrLg;b(]U4dBJ1QK5|^$}(bGJ9r𑪎igը2Cޣ*SԣT|rI3oB/c5x{38bY;6 tQDV #_ߏd *F)]B47 7r CH`[ne;LV.G9^5rÖ, PiQ (HԩM#fc(N pKsi`0b?UXmaұ"˙Ap|H)Yꑼ~2VEtӁ)EH6]Gq9i!Q mYXO#`~RۜC.NfKp{f(wzJVoHaX127 Wt2??-ӱIi:MzcիBdi[RrLСL|j]g U7T`2ud NyDŽO D1]DRg._)uyJN'{M""eUƪ@k4A'iKq%ໟX>uU e]`S ~y_p,zMJ+P?OH =X$?vWT4n u*drD'Ii gN$OOy$Ebdd_$=Ctߚ2#9-Im0O1F^ "5V&'N"mLaG0p9=6 '(zA*6lǔƼ>BAd¨/ۣ# ="E;Mz.UKEJ`B{%u !o,?z|ue H/>A|@ibiLדmS{qHH}{n-oXt"=z%=$l4p#={Mabo#u yXLZY^z_p:iEF6yoS`A|\i[ꚤ#EZHe]%64~QEY= L!SD<\RUl+ Mm:5 ]m1FMoIM ֠k&&*Zv*xhU!6}BGLfa+8y AKLL8đs ʓ6%>Fg#x}Ùly)?]&fA..4+ަ'sH.>L\` `I}@YSևE"\oT=PFZ ЧkMaj/o'CDv:J-IX5!%f+xr 6 솆FsyD%zh8v^ uMr -dHo&TԵ܊0khLi 4*(<@0ϗߦIfam1C Y=XdH(L;I] !>.U=pZu `/&Qwm|aryhZї`U T$Tų 3.BF;e͎dGv\9;'J"r sP!J05{œ~UKw9M֬IPjojYo*Zmei& kA*l@aӒ1Ps&9xP#Ki2Gz1i XE6iS#R'áǵÀX?5~:8%Fk,3D9Q0JRSətu;=)_lhކx{LAt ܹf@BR1h%c!l.Ibb0Elа[%-e]-gŽe{ #~72#/rKEq}'`tJGR *蚶hqQDžLu\o{E r/(tDZ<$yt>MC?_fɼw1()=㴮Kkm~}fD "ÿ7Zi*='Uk9==UT$vBX%J1[:1In02驜]DjY/AH^ƉF6`j7Rc|SfX6T/,c?dDޝƸG4Ԏ+Am 0p)e\cg< ḿEROEunl$9=Flzq9鹗WO{H& .)8Oļ,lcZ=]x@9@c y?ʙd ד+/ I]'B*qSu@Aq}{K1FF чgRt(-7 0ƥ2;H-[>_41IҼURICwg p1(%@I19wwZ,Bp]>^ i܆#tx50O J<`^9N&D笝cOcl-YSSe< FZa0(6\6C6%FW724"<ZZ)"5WsTй9SE%63S$/XeOc-FX̏\4K2܁ao:7w)Ug`N9Au\y}R*GPefE^~kL#@1I 捸Y<*D2o:R~o)