[Sub-Footnote i:  Compare in Buerger’s ‘Pfarrer’s Tochter’, “drei Spannen lang,” and see Appendix V.—­Ed.]

* * * * *

GOODY BLAKE AND HARRY GILL

A TRUE STORY

Composed 1798.—­Published 1798.

  [Written at Alfoxden.  The incident from Dr. Darwin’s ’Zooenomia’.—­I. 
  F.]

See Erasmus Darwin’s ‘Zooenomia’, vol. iv. pp. 68-69, ed. 1801.  It is the story of a man named Tullis, narrated by an Italian, Signer L. Storgosi, in a work called ‘Il Narratore Italiano’.

“I received good information of the truth of the following case, which was published a few years ago in the newspapers.  A young farmer in Warwickshire, finding his hedges broke, and the sticks carried away during a frosty season, determined to watch for the thief.  He lay many cold hours under a haystack, and at length an old woman, like a witch in a play, approached, and began to pull up the hedge; he waited till she had tied up her bundle of sticks, and was carrying them off, that he might convict her of the theft, and then springing from his concealment, he seized his prey with violent threats.  After some altercation, in which her load was left upon the ground, she kneeled upon her bundle of sticks, and raising her arms to Heaven, beneath the bright moon then at the full, spoke to the farmer, already shivering with cold, ’Heaven grant that thou mayest never know again the blessing to be warm.’  He complained of cold all the next day, and wore an upper coat, and in a few days another, and in a fortnight took to his bed, always saying nothing made him warm; he covered himself with many blankets, and had a sieve over his face as he lay; and from this one insane idea he kept his bed above twenty years for fear of the cold air, till at length he died.”

In the “Advertisement” to the first edition of “Lyrical Ballads,” Wordsworth says, “The tale of ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’ is founded on a well-authenticated fact which happened in Warwickshire.”

The following curious letter appeared in the ‘Ipswich Magazine’ of April 1799: 

  “IPSWICH, April 2, 1799.

  “To the Editors of the ‘Ipswich Magazine’.

“GENTLEMEN—­The scarcity of Coal at this time, and the piercing cold of the weather, cannot fail to be some apology for the depredations daily committed on the hedges in the neighbourhood.  If ever it be permitted, it ought in the present season.  Should there be any Farmer more rigorous than the rest, let him attend to the poetical story inserted in page 118 of this Magazine, and tremble at the fate of Farmer Gill, who was about to prosecute a poor old woman for a similar offence.  The thing is a fact, and told by one of the first physicians of the present day, as having happened in the south of England, ’and which has, a short time since’, been turned by a lyric poet into that excellent ballad.”

From 1815 to 1843, this poem was classed among those of “the Imagination.”  In 1845 it was transferred to the list of “Miscellaneous Poems.”—­Ed.