-Here ends my Tale: for in a trice
Arrived a neighbour with his horse;
Peter went forth with him straightway;
And, with due care, ere break of day,
Together they brought back the Corse.

And many years did this poor Ass,
Whom once it was my luck to see
Cropping the shrubs of Leming-Lane,
Help by his labour to maintain
The Widow and her family.

And Peter Bell, who, till that night,

Had been the wildest of his clan,

Forsook his crimes, renounced his folly,1
And, after ten months' melancholy,
Became a good and honest man.

1799.

THE poems belonging to the year 1799 were chiefly, if not wholly, composed at Goslar, in Germany, and all, with four exceptions, appeared in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800). The exceptions were the following:-The lyric beginning, "I travelled among unknown men," which was first published in the Poems of 1807; the Address to the Scholars of the Village School of the publication of which was delayed till the year 1845; and two fragments from The Prelude, viz., The Influence of Natural Objects (which appeared in The Friend in 1809), and The Simplon Pass (first published in the collected edition of 1845). Another fragment from The Prelude, beginning, "There was a boy," was also published in the Lyrical Ballads of 1800.

Wordsworth reached Goslar on the 6th of October 1798, and left it on the 10th of February 1799. It is impossible to determine the precise order in which the nineteen or twenty poems associated with this city

1

1832.

Forsook his crimes, repressed his folly,

1819.

were composed. But it is certain that the fragment on the immortal boy of Windermere, whom its cliffs and islands knew so well, was written in 1798,—not in 1799, as Wordsworth himself states,—because Coleridge sent a letter to his friend, thanking him for a MS. copy of these lines, and commenting on them, of which the date is "Ratzeburg, Dec. 10, 1798." I have, however, for obvious reasons, placed the three fragments from The Recluse together; and, since Wordsworth gave the date 1799 to the others, it would be gratuitous to suppose that he erred in reference to them all, because we know that his memory failed him in reference to one of the series. Therefore, although he spent more than twice as many days in 1798 as in 1799 at Goslar, I set down this group of poems as belonging to 1799, rather than to the previous year. It will be seen that, after placing all the poems of this Goslar period in the year to which they belong, it is possible also to group them according to their subject matter, without violating chronological order. Thus I place together the fragments afterwards incorporated in The Prelude. These are naturally followed by Nutting-a poem intended for The Prelude, but afterwards excluded as inappropriate. The four "Mathew" poems are placed in sequence, and the same thing is done with the five referring to "Lucy." Then a small group of three poems comes appropriately together, viz. :—Ruth, Lucy Gray, and The Danish Boy; while the Fenwick note almost necessitates our placing the Poet's Epitaph immediately after the Lines written in Germany; and with Wordsworth's life at Goslar we naturally associate these five things-the cold winter, The Prelude, the Mathew Poems, Lucy, and the Poet's Epitaph.-ED.

Were fellow-travellers in this gloomy Pass,1
And with them did we journey several hours
At a slow step.2 The immeasurable height
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed,
The stationary blasts of waterfalls,

And in the narrow rent, at every turn,

Winds thwarting winds bewildered and forlorn,
The torrents shooting from the clear blue sky,
The rocks that muttered close upon our ears,
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light-
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,
Characters of the great Apocalypse,

The types and symbols of Eternity,

Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

This is an extract from the sixth book of The Prelude. It refers to Wordsworth's first experience of Switzerland, when he crossed the Alps by the Simplon route in 1790, in company with his friend Robert Jones.-ED.

INFLUENCE OF NATURAL OBJECTS

IN CALLING FORTH AND STRENGTHENING THE IMAGINATION IN BOYHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH.

From an unpublished poem, written in Germany.

[This extract is reprinted from "The Friend."]

The title of the fragment, as it appeared in The Friend, under date Dec. 28, 1809, is "Growth of Genius from the Influence of Natural Objects on the Imagination in Boyhood and Early Youth."-ED.

WISDOM and Spirit of the universe!

Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!
And giv'st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,

By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn
Of childhood didst thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human soul;

Not1 with the mean and vulgar works of Man;
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature; purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying by such discipline
Both pain and fear, until we recognise
A grandeur in the beatings of the heart.

Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me
With stinted kindness. In November days,
When vapours rolling down the valleys made
A lonely scene more lonesome; among woods
At noon; and mid the calm of summer nights,
When, by the margin of the trembling lake,
Beneath the gloomy hills, homeward I went2
In solitude, such intercourse was mine:
Mine was it in the fields both day and night,
And by the waters, all the summer long.
And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and, visible for many a mile,

The cottage-windows through the twilight blazed,b
I heeded not the summons: happy time

It was indeed for all of us; for me

It was a time of rapture! Clear and loud
The village-clock tolled six-I wheeled about,
Proud and exulting like an untired horse

That cares not for his1 home.-All shod with steel
We hissed along the polished ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase

And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The pack loud-chiming, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle: with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far-distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound

Of melancholy, not unnoticed while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.

Not seldom from the uproar I retired Into a silent bay, or sportively

Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex5 of a star;

Image, that, flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain :" and oftentimes,