the second volume of “Lyrical Ballads” (1800).  It will thus be seen that it is only by comparing Wordsworth’s own lists of the years to which his Poems belong, with the contents of the several editions of his Works, with the Fenwick Notes, and with his sister’s Journal, that we can approximately reconstruct the true chronology.  To these sources of information must be added the internal evidence of the Poems themselves, incidental references in letters to friends, and stray hints gathered from various quarters.

Many new sources of information as to the date of the composition of the Poems became known to me during the publication of my previous edition, and after its issue; the most important being the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth.  These discoveries showed that my chronological table of 1882—­although then, relatively, “up to date”—­was incomplete.  The tables constructed by Mr. Tutin and by Professor Dowden are both more accurate than it was.  It is impossible to attain to finality in such a matter; and several facts, afterwards discovered, and mentioned in the later volumes of my previous edition, have been used against the conclusions come to in the earlier ones.  I have thus supplied the feathers for a few subsequent critical arrows.  The shots have not been unkindly ones; and I am glad of the result, viz. that our knowledge of the dates—­both as to the composition and first publication of the poems —­is now much more exact than before.  When a conjectural one is given in this edition, the fact is always mentioned.

This chronological method of arrangement, however, has its limits.  It is not possible always to adopt it:  nor is it invariably ‘necessary’, even in order to obtain a true view of the growth of Wordsworth’s mind.  In this—­as in so many other things—­wisdom lies in the avoidance of extremes; the extreme of rigid fidelity to the order of time on the one hand, and the extreme of an irrational departure from it on the other.  While an effort has been made to discover the exact order of the composition of the poems—­and this is shown, not only in the Chronological Table, but at the beginning of each separate poem—­it has been considered expedient to depart from that order in printing some of the poems.  In certain cases a poem was begun and laid aside, and again resumed at intervals; and it is difficult to know to what year the larger part of it should be assigned.  When we know the date at which a poem was commenced, and that it was finished “long afterwards,” but have no clue as to the year, it is assigned to the year in which it was begun.  For example, the ‘Address to Kilchurn Castle’ was begun in 1803, but only the first three lines were written then.  Wordsworth tells us that “the rest was added many years after,” but when we know not; and the poem was not published till 1827.  In such a case, it is placed in this edition as if it belonged chronologically to 1803, and retains its place in the series of Poems which memorialise the