Of flocks upon the neighbouring hills 1802.]

[Variant 12: 

1845.

  ... sits ... 1800.]

[Variant 13: 

  When near this blasted tree you pass,
  Two sods are plainly to be seen
  Close at its root, and each with grass
  Is cover’d fresh and green. 
  Like turf upon a new-made grave
  These two green sods together lie,
  Nor heat, nor cold, nor rain, nor wind
  Can these two sods together bind,
  Nor sun, nor earth, nor sky,
  But side by side the two are laid,
  As if just sever’d by the spade.

This stanza occurs only in the edition of 1800.]

[Variant 14: 

1815.

  They seem ... 1800.]

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A:  These Stanzas were designed to introduce a Ballad upon the Story of a Danish Prince who had fled from Battle, and, for the sake of the valuables about him, was murdered by the Inhabitant of a Cottage in which he had taken refuge.  The House fell under a curse, and the Spirit of the Youth, it was believed, haunted the Valley where the crime had been committed.—­W.  W. 1827.]

* * * * *

LUCY GRAY; OR, SOLITUDE

Composed 1799.—­Published 1800

[Written at Goslar, in Germany, in 1799.  It was founded on a circumstance told me by my sister, of a little girl, who, not far from Halifax in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow storm.  Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of a lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could be traced.  The body, however, was found in the canal.  The way in which the incident was treated, and the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influences, which I have endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe’s matter-of-fact style of handling subjects of the same kind.  This is not spoken to his disparagement, far from it; but to direct the attention of thoughtful readers into whose hands these notes may fall, to a comparison that may enlarge the circle of their sensibilities, and tend to produce in them a catholic judgment.—­I.F.]

One of the “Poems referring to the Period of Childhood.”—­Ed.

  Oft I had heard [1] of Lucy Gray: 
  And, when I crossed the wild,
  I chanced to see at break of day
  The solitary child.

  No mate, no comrade Lucy knew; 5
  She dwelt on a wide moor, [2]
—­The sweetest thing that ever grew
  Beside a human door!

  You yet may spy the fawn at play,
  The hare upon the green; 10
  But the sweet [3] face of Lucy Gray
  Will never more be seen.

  “To-night will be a stormy night—­
  You to the town must go;
  And take a lantern, Child, to light 15
  Your mother through the snow.”