“Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown! 
  It must, or we shall rue it:  50
  We have a vision of our own;
  Ah! why should we undo it? 
  The treasured dreams of times long past,
  We’ll keep them, winsome Marrow! 
  For when we’re there, although ’tis fair, 55
  ’Twill be another Yarrow.

  “If Care with freezing years should come,
  And wandering seem but folly,—­
  Should we be loth to stir from home,
  And yet be melancholy; 60
  Should life be dull, and spirits low,
  ’Twill soothe us in our sorrow,
  That earth has something yet to show,
  The bonny holms of Yarrow!”

* * * * *

VARIANT ON THE TEXT

[Variant 1: 

1832.

  ... downwards ... 1807.]

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A:  See Hamilton’s Ballad as above.—­W.  W. 1807.]

[Footnote B:  In his “Recollections of Wordsworth,” Aubrey de Vere reports a conversation, in which the poet said to him,

  “Scott misquoted in one of his novels my lines on ‘Yarrow’, He makes
  me write,

    ’The swans on sweet St. Mary’s Lake
    Float double, swans and shadow;’

  but I wrote,

    ‘The swan on still St. Mary’s Lake.’

Never could I have written ‘swans’ in the plural.  The scene when I saw it, with its still and dim lake, under the dusky hills, was one of utter loneliness:  there was one swan, and one only, stemming the water, and the pathetic loneliness of the region gave importance to the one companion of that swan, its own white image in the water.  It was for that reason that I recorded the Swan and the Shadow.  Had there been many swans and many shadows, they would have implied nothing as regards the character of the place; and I should have said nothing about them.”

See his ‘Essays, chiefly on Poetry’, vol. ii. p. 277.

Wordsworth wrote to his friend, Walter Scott, to thank him for a copy of ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, and in return sent a copy of these stanzas, ‘Yarrow Unvisited’.  Scott replied gratefully on the 16th March 1805, and said,

“...  I by no means admit your apology, however ingeniously and artfully stated, for not visiting the bonny holms of Yarrow, and certainly will not rest till I have prevailed upon you to compare the ideal with the real stream.”

Wordsworth had asked him if he could suggest any name more true to the place than Burnmill, in the line, “The sweets of Burn-mill meadow.”  Scott replied: 

“We have Broad-meadow upon Yarrow, which with the addition of green or fair or any other epithet of one syllable, will give truth to the locality, and supply the place of Burnmill meadow, which we have not. ...  I like your swan upon St. Mary’s Lake.  How came you to know that it is actually frequented by that superb bird?”

(See ‘Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott’, vol. i. pp. 28, 29.)—­Ed.]