While I am lying on the grass,
  I hear thy restless shout: 
  From hill to hill it seems to pass,
  About, and all about! 1807.

  While I am lying on the grass,
  Thy loud note smites my ear!—­
  From hill to hill it seems to pass,
  At once far off and near! 1815.

  While I am lying on the grass,
  Thy loud note smites my ear! 
  It seems to fill the whole air’s space,
  At once far off and near. 1820.

  While I am lying on the grass
  Thy twofold shout I hear,
  That seems to fill the whole air’s space,
  As loud far off as near. 1827.

  While I am lying on the grass
  Thy twofold shout I hear,
  From hill to hill it seems to pass,
  At once far off, and near. 1845.

Similarly, in each of the three poems ‘To the Daisy’, composed in 1802, and in the ‘Afterthought, to the Duddon’, the alterations introduced into the latest editions were all improvements upon the early version.

It might be urged that these considerations would warrant the interference of an editor, and justify him in selecting the text which he thought the best upon the whole; but this must be left to posterity.  When editors can escape the bias of contemporary thought and feeling, when their judgments are refined by distance and mellowed by the new literary standards of the intervening years,—­when in fact Wordsworth is as far away from his critics as Shakespeare now is—­it may be possible to adjust a final text.  But the task is beyond the power of the present generation.

It may farther be urged that if this reasoning be valid,—­and if, for the present, one text must be retained uniformly throughout,—­the natural plan is to take the earliest, and not the latest; and this has some recommendations.  It seems more simple, more natural, and certainly the easiest.  We have a natural sequence, if we begin with the earliest and go on to the latest readings.  Then, all the readers of Wordsworth, who care to possess or to consult the present edition, will doubtless possess one or other of the complete copies of his works, which contain his final text; while probably not one in twenty have ever seen the first edition of any of his poems, with the exception of ‘The Prelude’.  It is true that if the reader turns to a footnote to compare the versions of different years, while he is reading for the sake of the poetry, he will be so distracted that the effect of the poem as a whole will be entirely lost; because the critical spirit, which judges of the text, works apart from the spirit of sympathetic appreciation, in which all poetry should be read.  But it is not necessary to turn to the footnotes, and to mark what may be called the literary growth of a poem, while it is being read for its own sake:  and these notes are printed in smaller type, so as not to obtrude themselves on the eye of the reader.