“I question whether by reading everything which he gives us, we are so likely to acquire an admiring sense, even of his variety and abundance, as by reading what he gives us at his happier moments.  Receive him absolutely without omission and compromise, follow his whole outpouring, stanza by stanza, and line by line, from the very commencement to the very end, and he is capable of being tiresome.” [18]

This is quite true; nevertheless, English literature demands a complete edition of all the works of Byron:  and it may be safely predicted that, for weightier reasons and with greater urgency, it will continue to call for the collected works of Wordsworth.

It should also be noted that the fact of Wordsworth’s having dictated to Miss Fenwick (so late as 1843) a stanza from ‘The Convict’ in his note to ‘The Lament of Mary Queen of Scots’ (1817), justifies the inclusion of the whole of that (suppressed) poem in such an edition as this.

The fact that Wordsworth did not republish all his Poems, in his final edition of 1849-50, is not conclusive evidence that he thought them unworthy of preservation, and reproduction.  It must be remembered that ‘The Prelude’ itself was a posthumous publication; and also that the fragmentary canto of ‘The Recluse’, entitled “Home at Grasmere”—­as well as the other canto published in 1886, and entitled (most prosaically) “Composed when a probability existed of our being obliged to quit Rydal Mount as a residence”—­were not published by the poet himself.  I am of opinion that his omission of the stanzas beginning: 

  Among all lovely things my Love had been,

and of the sonnet on his ‘Voyage down the Rhine’, was due to sheer forgetfulness of their existence.  Few poets remember all their past, fugitive, productions.  At the same time, there are other fragments,—­written when he was experimenting with his theme, and when the inspiration of genius had forsaken him,—­which it is unfortunate that he did not himself destroy.

Among the Poems which Wordsworth suppressed, in his final edition, is the Latin translation of ‘The Somnambulist’ by his son.  This will be republished, more especially as it was included by Wordsworth himself in the second edition of his “Yarrow Revisited.”

It may be well to mention the ‘repetitions’ which are inevitable in this edition,

(1) As already explained, those fragments of ’The Recluse’—­which were issued in all the earlier volumes, and afterwards incorporated in ’The Prelude’—­are printed as they originally appeared.

(2) Short Notes are extracted from Dorothy Wordsworth’s ’Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland’ (1803), which illustrate the Poems composed during that Tour, while the whole text of that Tour will be printed in full in subsequent volumes.

(3) Other fragments, including the lines beginning,

  Wisdom and Spirit of the universe,