“Fox ghyll, Ambleside, ‘4th October 1881’.

“I have been long intending to write you as to the manuscript notes and alterations in Wordsworth’s poems, which you have had the opportunity of seeing, and, so far as you thought fit, of using for your edition.  They came into my possession in this way.  I saw them advertised in a catalogue which was sent me, and at my request the book was very courteously forwarded to me for my inspection.  It appeared to me of sufficient interest and value to induce me to buy it; and I accordingly became the purchaser.

“It is a copy of the edition in six volumes, the publication of which began in the year 1836; and of the volume containing the collected sonnets, which was afterwards printed uniformly with that edition.  It appears to have been the copy which Wordsworth himself used for correcting, altering, and adding to the poems contained in it.  As you have seen, in some of the poems the Alterations are very large, amounting sometimes to a complete rewriting of considerable passages.  Many of these alterations have been printed in subsequent editions; some have not; two or three small poems, as far as I know, have not been hitherto published.  Much of the writing is Wordsworth’s own; but perhaps the larger portion is the hand-writing of others, one or more, not familiar to me as Wordsworth’s is.

“How the volumes came to be sold I do not know....  Such as they are, and whatever be their interest or value, you are, as far as I am concerned, heartily welcome to them; and I shall be glad indeed if they add in the least degree to make your edition more worthy of the great man for whom my admiration grows every day I live, and my deep gratitude to whom will cease only with my life, and my reason.”

This precious copy of the edition of 1836-7 is now the property of Lady Coleridge.  I re-examined it in 1894, and added several readings, which I had omitted to note twelve years ago, when Lord Coleridge first showed it to me.  I should add that, since the issue of the volumes of 1882-6, many other Ms. copies of individual Poems have come under my notice; and that every important variation of text in them is incorporated in this edition.

As it is impossible to discover the precise year in which the suggested alterations of text were written by Wordsworth, on the margin of the edition of 1836, they will be indicated, wherever they occur, by the initial letter C. Comparatively few changes occur in the poems of early years.

A copy of the 1814 (quarto) edition of ‘The Excursion’, now in the possession of a grandson of the poet, the Rev. John Wordsworth, Gosforth Rectory, Cumberland—­which was the copy Wordsworth kept at Rydal Mount for annotation and correction, much in the same way as he kept the edition of 1836-7—­has also been kindly sent to me by its present owner, for examination and use in this edition; and, in it, I have found some additional readings.