“What inclined me to think that the poem was written earlier than 1805 was that it anticipates Dorothy’s marriage, and this would more naturally be present as a probable event in W. W.’s mind in 1794 or thereabouts than in 1805, after Dorothy had dedicated her life to her brother, to the exclusion of all wish to make a home of her own by marriage.  The expression ‘Healthy as a shepherd boy’ is also more applicable to a girl of twenty-two than to a woman of thirty-three.  Do you think it possible that the poem may have been written in 1794, and not published till later, when its application would be less evident to the family circle?”

Dorothy Wordsworth’s letter will be quoted in full in a later volume, but the following extract from it may be given now: 

“I cannot pass unnoticed that part of your letter in which you speak of my ‘rambling about the country on foot.’  So far from considering this as a matter for condemnation I rather thought it would have given my friends pleasure that I had courage to make use of the strength with which Nature has endowed me, when it not only procured me infinitely more pleasure than I should have received from sitting in a post-chaise, but was also the means of saving me at least thirty shillings.”

I do not think the date of composition can be so early as 1794.  What may be called internal, or structural, evidence is against it.  Wordsworth never could have written these two poems till after his settlement at Dove Cottage.  Besides, in 1794, he could have no knowledge of a possible “nest in a green dale, a harbour and a hold”; while at that time his sister had certainly no “cottage home.”  I believe they were written after he took up his residence at Town-end (the date being uncertain); and that they refer to his sister, and not to his wife.  It has been suggested by Mr. Ernest Coleridge (see ‘The Athenaeum’, Oct. 21, 1893) that they refer to Mary Hutchinson:  but there is no evidence of Wordsworth taking long country walks with her before their marriage, or that she was “nymph-like,” “fleet and strong,” that she loved to “roam the moorland,” “in weather rough and bleak,” or that she “hunted waterfalls.”  The reference to his sister is confirmed by the omission of the delightful second stanza of the poem in the last edition revised by the poet, that of 1849, when she was a confirmed invalid at Rydal Mount.  Those “smiles to earth unknown,” had then ceased for ever.  The reason why Wordsworth erased so delightful and wonderful a stanza, is to me only explicable on the supposition, that it was his sister he referred to, she who had accompanied him in former days, in so many of his “long walks in the country.”  His wife never did this; she had not the physical strength to do it; and, if she had been the person referred to, Wordsworth would hardly, in 1845, have erased such a description of her, as occurs in the stanza written in 1802, when she was still so vigorous.