Nevertheless, it would be easy for an editor to show the unfortunate result of keeping rigorously either to the latest or to the earliest text of Wordsworth.  If, on the one hand, the latest were taken, it could be shown that many of the changes introduced into it were for the worse, and some of them very decidedly so.  For example, in the poem ’To a Skylark’—­composed in 1825—­the second verse, retained in the editions of 1827, 1832, 1836, and 1843, was unaccountably dropped out in the editions of 1845 and 1849.  The following is the complete poem of 1825, as published in 1827.

  Ethereal Minstrel!  Pilgrim of the sky! 
  Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? 
  Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
  Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground? 
  Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
  Those quivering wings composed, that music still!

  To the last point of vision, and beyond,
  Mount, daring Warbler! that love-prompted strain,
  (’Twixt thee and thine a never-failing bond)
  Thrills not the less the bosom of the plain: 
  Yet might’st thou seem, proud privilege! to sing
  All independent of the leafy spring.

  Leave to the Nightingale her shady wood;
  A privacy of glorious light is thine;
  Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
  Of harmony, with rapture more divine;
  Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
  True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

There is no doubt that the first and third stanzas are the finest, and some may respect the judgment that cut down the Poem by the removal of its second verse:  but others will say, if it was right that such a verse should be removed, why were many others of questionable merit allowed to remain?  Why was such a poem as ‘The Glowworm’, of the edition of 1807, never republished; while ‘The Waterfall and the Eglantine’, and ’To the Spade of a Friend’, were retained?  To give one other illustration, where a score are possible.  In the sonnet, belonging to the year 1807, beginning: 

  “Beloved Vale!” I said, “when I shall con,”

we find, in the latest text, the lines—­first adopted in 1827: 

  I stood, of simple shame the blushing Thrall;
  So narrow seemed the brooks, the fields so small,

while the early edition of 1807 contains the far happier lines: 

  To see the Trees, which I had thought so tall,
  Mere dwarfs; the Brooks so narrow, Fields so small.

On the other hand, if the earliest text be invariably retained, some of the best poems will be spoiled (or the improvements lost), since Wordsworth did usually alter for the better.  For example, few persons will doubt that the form in which the second stanza of the poem ’To the Cuckoo’ (written in 1802) appeared in 1845, is an improvement on all its predecessors.  I give the readings of 1807, 1815, 1820, 1827, and 1845.