The chief advantage of a chronological arrangement of the Works of any author—­and especially of a poet who himself adopted a different plan—­is that it shows us, as nothing else can do, the growth of his own mind, the progressive development of his genius and imaginative power.  By such a redistribution of what he wrote we can trace the rise, the culmination, and also—­it may be—­the decline and fall of his genius.  Wordsworth’s own arrangement—­first adopted in the edition of 1815—­was designed by him, with the view of bringing together, in separate classes, those Poems which referred to the same (or similar) subjects, or which were supposed to be the product of the same (or a similar) faculty, irrespective of the date of composition.  Thus one group was entitled “Poems of the Fancy,” another “Poems of the Imagination,” a third “Poems proceeding from Sentiment and Reflection,” a fourth “Epitaphs and Elegiac Pieces,” again “Poems on the Naming of Places,” “Memorials of Tours,” “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” “Miscellaneous Sonnets,” etc.  The principle which guided him in this was obvious enough.  It was, in some respects, a most natural arrangement; and, in now adopting a chronological order, the groups, which he constructed with so much care, are broken up.  Probably every author would attach more importance to a classification of his Works, which brought them together under appropriate headings, irrespective of date, than to a method of arrangement which exhibited the growth of his own mind; and it may be taken for granted that posterity would not think highly of any author who attached special value to this latter element.  None the less posterity may wish to trace the gradual development of genius, in the imaginative writers of the past, by the help of such a subsequent rearrangement of their Works.

There are difficulties, however, in the way of such a rearrangement, some of which, in Wordsworth’s case, cannot be entirely surmounted.  In the case of itinerary Sonnets, referring to the same subject, the dismemberment of a series—­carefully arranged by their author—­seems to be specially unnatural.  But Wordsworth himself sanctioned the principle.  If there was a fitness in collecting all his sonnets in one volume in the year 1838, out of deference to the wishes of his friends, in order that these poems might be “brought under the eye at once”—­thus removing them from their original places, in his collected works—­it seems equally fitting now to rearrange them chronologically, as far as it is possible to do so.  It will be seen that it is not always possible.

Then, there is the case of two Poems following each other, in Wordsworth’s own arrangement, by natural affinity; such as the ’Epistle to Sir George Beaumont’, written in 1811, which in almost all existing editions is followed by the Poem written in 1841, and entitled, ’Upon perusing the foregoing Epistle thirty years after its composition’; or, the dedication to ‘The White Doe of Rylstone’, written in April 1815, while the Poem itself was written in 1807.  To separate these Poems seems unnatural; and, as it would be inadmissible to print the second of the two twice over—­once as a sequel to the first poem, and again in its chronological place—­adherence to the latter plan has its obvious disadvantage in the case of these poems.