In the case of many of the poems, we are left to conjecture the date of composition, although we are seldom without some clue to it.  The Fenwick Notes are a great assistance in determining the chronology.  These notes—­which will be afterwards more fully referred to—­were dictated by Wordsworth to Miss Fenwick in the year 1843; but, at that time, his memory could not be absolutely trusted as to dates; and in some instances we know it to have been at fault.  For example, he said of ’The Old Cumberland Beggar’ that it was “written at Racedown and Alfoxden in my twenty-third year.”  Now, he went to Racedown in the autumn of 1795, when he was twenty-five years old; and to Alfoxden, in the autumn of 1797, when twenty-seven.  Again, the poem ‘Rural Architecture’ is put down in the Fenwick note as “written at Townend in 1801”; but it had been published in 1800, in the second edition of “Lyrical Ballads.”  Similarly Wordsworth gave the dates “1801 or 1802” for ’The Reverie of Poor Susan’, which had also appeared in “Lyrical Ballads,” 1800.

Wordsworth’s memory was not always to be trusted even when he was speaking of a group of his own Poems.  For example, in the edition of 1807, there is a short series described thus, “Poems, composed during a tour, chiefly on foot.”  They are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.  Now, one would naturally suppose that all the poems, in this set of five, were composed during the same pedestrian tour, and that they all referred to the same time.  But the series contains ‘Alice Fell’ (1802), ‘Beggars’ (1802), ’To a Sky-Lark’ (1805), and ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802).

Much more valuable than the Fenwick notes—­for a certain portion of Wordsworth’s life—­is his sister Dorothy’s Journal.  The mistakes in the former can frequently be corrected from the minutely kept diary of those early years, when the brother and sister lived together at Grasmere.  The whole of that Journal, so far as it is desirable to print it for posterity, will be given in a subsequent volume.

Long before the publication of the Fenwick notes, Wordsworth himself supplied some data for a chronological arrangement of his Works.  In the table of contents, prefixed to the first collected edition of 1815, in two volumes,—­and also to the second collected edition of 1820, in four volumes,—­there are two parallel columns:  one giving the date of composition, and the other that of publication.  There are numerous blanks in the former column, which was the only important one; as the year of publication could be ascertained from the editions themselves.  Sometimes the date is given vaguely; as in the case of the “Sonnets dedicated to Liberty,” where the note runs, “from the year 1807 to 1813.”  At other times, the entry of the year of publication is inaccurate; for example, the ’Inscription for the spot where the Hermitage stood on St. Herbert’s Island, Derwentwater’, is put down as belonging to the year 1807; but this poem does not occur in the volumes of 1807, but in