“Saturday (March 13, 1802).—­William wrote the poem of the Beggar Woman, taken from a woman whom I had seen in May (now nearly two years ago), when John and he were at Gallow Hill.  I sat with him at intervals all the morning, and took down his stanzas.  After tea I read W. the account I had written of the little boy belonging to the tall woman:  and an unlucky thing it was, for he could not escape from those very words, and so he could not write the poem.  He left it unfinished, and went tired to bed.  In our walk from Rydal he had got warmed with the subject, and had half cast the poem.”

  “Sunday Morning (March 14).—­William had slept badly.  He got up at 9
  o’clock, but before he rose he had finished the Beggar Boy.”

The following is the “account” written in her Journal on Tuesday, May 23, 1800: 

“A very tall woman, tall much beyond the measure of tall women, called at the door.  She had on a very long brown cloak, and a very white cap, without bonnet.  Her face was brown, but it had plainly once been fair.  She led a little barefooted child about two years old by the hand, and said her husband, who was a tinker, was gone before with the other children.  I gave her a piece of bread.  Afterwards, on my road to Ambleside, beside the bridge at Rydal, I saw her husband sitting at the roadside, his two asses standing beside him, and the two young children at play upon the grass.  The man did not beg.  I passed on, and about a quarter of a mile farther I saw two boys before me, one about ten, the other about eight years old, at play, chasing a butterfly.  They were wild figures, not very ragged, but without shoes and stockings.  The hat of the elder was wreathed round with yellow flowers; the younger, whose hat was only a rimless crown, had stuck it round with laurel leaves.  They continued at play till I drew very near, and then they addressed me with the begging cant and the whining voice of sorrow.  I said, ‘I served your mother this morning’ (the boys were so like the woman who had called at our door that I could not be mistaken).  ‘O,’ says the elder, ’you could not serve my mother, for she’s dead, and my father’s in at the next town; he’s a potter.’  I persisted in my assertion, and that I would give them nothing.  Says the elder, ‘Come, let’s away,’ and away they flew like lightning.  They had, however, sauntered so long in their road that they did not reach Ambleside before me, and I saw them go up to Mathew Harrison’s house with their wallet upon the elder’s shoulder, and creeping with a beggar’s complaining foot.  On my return through Ambleside I met, in the street, the mother driving her asses, in the two panniers of one of which were the two little children, whom she was chiding and threatening with a wand with which she used to drive on her asses, while the little things hung in wantonness over the pannier’s edge.  The woman had told me in the morning that she was of Scotland, which her accent fully proved, and that she had lived (I think at Wigtown); that they could not keep a house, and so they travelled.”

This was one of the “Poems of the Imagination.”—­Ed.