" ...  I should not think of devoting less than 20 years to an Epic Poem:  ten to collect materials and warm my mind with universal science.  I would be a tolerable Mathematician, I would thoroughly know Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine—­then the ’mind of man’—­then the ’minds of men’—­in all Travels, Voyages, and Histories.  So I would spend ten years—­the next five to the composition of the poem—­and the last five to the correction of it.  So would I write, haply not unhearing of the divine and rightly whispering Voice,” etc.

Mr. T. Hutchinson (Dublin) writes in ‘The Athenaeum’, Dec. 15, 1894: 

“I take it for granted these lines were written, not only on the fly-leaf of Wordsworth’s copy of the ‘Castle of Indolence’, but also by way of Supplement to that poem; i. e. as an ‘addendum’ to the descriptive list of the denizens of the Castle given in stanzas LVII-LXIX of Canto I.; that, in short, they are meant to be read as though they were an after-thought of James Thomson’s.  Their author, therefore, has rightly imparted to them the curiously blended flavour of ‘romantic melancholy and slippered mirth,’ of dreamlike vagueness and smiling hyperbole, which forms the distinctive mark of Thomson’s poem; and thus the Poet and the Philosopher-Friend of Wordsworth’s stanzas, like Thomson’s companion sketches of the splenetic Solitary, the ‘bard more fat than bard beseems,’ and the ’little, round, fat, oily Man of God,’ are neither more nor less than gentle caricatures.”

It has been suggested by Coleridge’s grandson that Wordsworth was describing S. T. C. in all the stanzas of this poem; that he drew two separate pictures of him; in the first four stanzas a realistic “character portrait,” and in the last four a “companion picture, figuring the outward semblance of Coleridge, but embodying characteristics drawn from a third person”; so that we have a “fancy sketch” mixed up with a real one.  I cannot agree with this.  The evidence against it is

(1) Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal; (2) the poet’s and his wife’s remarks to Mr. Justice Coleridge; (3) the fact that Wordsworth was not in the habit of “passing from realism into artistic composition,” except where he distinctly indicated it, as in the case of the Hawkshead Schoolmaster, in the “Matthew” poems.  Such composite or conglomerate work was quite foreign to Wordsworth’s genius.

Ed.

* * * * *

RESOLUTION AND INDEPENDENCE

Begun May 3, finished July 4, 1802.—­Published 1807

[Written at Town-end, Grasmere.  This old man I met a few hundred yards from my cottage; and the account of him is taken from his own mouth.  I was in the state of feeling described in the beginning of the poem, while crossing over Barton Fell from Mr. Clarkson’s, at the foot of Ullswater, towards Askham.  The image of the hare I then observed on the ridge of the Fell.—­I.F.]