“I have an idea that the fact that it took place at midsummer eve (June 27), the eve of the Feast of St. John, upon which occasion the shepherds hereabout used to light bonfires on the hills (no doubt a relic of the custom of the Beltane fires of old Norse days, perhaps of earlier sun-worship festivals of British times), may have had something to do with the naming of the mountain Blencathara of which Southen-fell (or Shepherd’s-fell, as the name implies) is part.  Blencathara, we are told, may mean the Hill of Demons, or the haunted hill.  My suggestion is that the old sun-worshippers, who met in midsummer eve on Castrigg at the Druid circle or Donn-ring, saw just the same phenomenon as Strichet and Lancaster saw upon Southen-fell, and hence the name.  Nay, perhaps the Druid circle was built where it is, because it was well in view of the Demon Hill.”

Ed.]

[Footnote R:  This is a fact of which I have been an eye-witness.—­W.  W. 1793.]

[Footnote S:  The quotation is from Collins’ ‘The Passions’, l. 60.  Compare ‘Personal Talk’, l. 26.—­Ed.]

[Footnote T:  Alluding to this passage of Spenser: 

     ...  Her angel face
  As the great eye of Heaven shined bright,
  And made a sunshine in that shady place.  W. W. 1793.

This passage is in ‘The Fairy Queen’, book I. canto iii. stanza 4.—­Ed.]

[Footnote U:  Compare Dr. John Brown: 

  But the soft murmur of swift-gushing rills,
  Forth issuing from the mountain’s distant steep
  (Unheard till now, and now scarce heard), proclaim’d
  All things at rest.

This Dr. John Brown—­a singularly versatile English divine (1717-1766)—­was one of the first, as Wordsworth pointed put, to lead the way to a true estimate of the English Lakes.  His description of the Vale of Keswick, in a letter to a friend, is as fine as anything in Gray’s ‘Journal’.  Wordsworth himself quotes the lines given in this footnote in the first section of his ’Guide through the District of the Lakes’.—­Ed.]

* * * * *

LINES WRITTEN WHILE SAILING IN A BOAT AT EVENING

Composed 1789.—­Published 1798

[This title is scarcely correct.  It was during a solitary walk on the banks of the Cam that I was first struck with this appearance, and applied it to my own feelings in the manner here expressed, changing the scene to the Thames, near Windsor.  This, and the three stanzas of the following poem, ‘Remembrance of Collins’, formed one piece; but, upon the recommendation of Coleridge, the three last stanzas were separated from the other.—­I.  F.]

The title of the poem in 1798, when it consisted of five stanzas, was ‘Lines written near Richmond, upon the Thames, at Evening’.  When, in the edition of 1800, it was divided, the title of the first part was, ’Lines written when sailing in a Boat at Evening’; that of the second part was ‘Lines written near Richmond upon the Thames’.