“Yarrow Revisited, and Other Poems”—­contains two, which Wordsworth himself tells us were composed earlier; and there is no reason why these poems should not be restored to their chronological place.  The series of itinerary sonnets, published along with them in the Yarrow volume of 1835, is the record of another Scottish tour, taken in the year 1833; and Wordsworth says of them that they were “composed ‘or suggested’ during a tour in the summer of 1833.”  We cannot now discover which of them were written during the tour, and which at Rydal Mount after his return; but it is obvious that they should be printed in the order in which they were left by him, in 1835.  It may be noted that almost all the “Evening Voluntaries” belong to these years—­1832 to 1835—­when the author was from sixty-two to sixty-five years of age.

Wordsworth’s habit of revision may perhaps explain the mistakes into which he occasionally fell as to the dates of his Poems, and the difficulty of reconciling what he says, as to the year of composition, with the date assigned by his sister in her Journal.  When he says “written in 1801, or 1802,” he may be referring to the last revision which he gave to his work.  Certain it is, however, that he sometimes gave a date for the composition, which was subsequent to the publication of the poem in question.

In the case of those poems to which no date was attached, I have tried to find a clue by which to fix an approximate one.  Obviously, it would not do to place all the undated poems in a class by themselves.  Such an arrangement would be thoroughly artificial; and, while we are in many instances left to conjecture, we can always say that such and such a poem was composed not later than a particular year.  When the precise date is undiscoverable, I have thought it best to place the poem in or immediately before the year in which it was first published.

Poems which were several years in process of composition, having been laid aside, and taken up repeatedly; ‘e.g.  The Prelude’, which was composed between the years 1799 and 1805—­are placed in the year in which they were finished.  Disputable questions as to the date of any poem are dealt with in the editorial note prefixed or appended to it.

There is one Poem which I have intentionally placed out of its chronological place, viz. the ’Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’.  It was written at intervals from 1803 to 1806, and was first published in the edition of 1807, where it stood at the end of the second volume.  In every subsequent edition of the collected Works—­1815 to 1850—­it closed the groups of poems; ’The Excursion’ only following it, in a volume of its own.  This was an arrangement made by Wordsworth, of set purpose, and steadily adhered to—­the ‘Ode’ forming as it were the High Altar of his poetic Cathedral.  As he wished it to retain that place in subsequent editions of his Works, it retains it in this one.