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VARIANTS ON THE TEXT

[Variant 1: 

1845.

  The budding groves appear’d as if in haste
  To spur the steps of June; as if their shades
  Of various green were hindrances that stood
  Between them and their object:  yet, meanwhile,
  There was such deep contentment in the air 1800.]

[Variant 2: 

1845.

  ... seem’d as though ... 1800.]

The text of the “Poems on the Naming of Places” underwent comparatively little alteration in successive editions.  Both the changes in the first poem were made in 1845.  From the Fenwick note, it is evident that “the Rivulet” was Easdale beck.  But where was “Emma’s Dell”?  In the autumn of 1877, Dr. Cradock, the Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford, took me to a place, of which he afterwards wrote,

“I have a fancy for a spot just beyond Goody Bridge to the left, where the brook makes a curve, and returns to the road two hundred yards farther on.  But I have not discovered a trace of authority in favour of the idea farther than that the wooded bend of the brook with the stepping stones across it, connected with a field-path recently stopped, was a very favourite haunt of Wordsworth’s.  At the upper part of this bend, near to the place where the brook returns to the road, is a deep pool at the foot of a rush of water.  In this pool, a man named Wilson was drowned many years ago.  He lived at a house on the hill called Score Crag, which, if my conjecture as to Emma’s Dell is right, is the ‘single mountain cottage’ on a ’summit, distant a short space.’  Wordsworth, happening to be walking at no great distance, heard a loud shriek.  It was that of Mr. Wilson, the father, who had just discovered his son’s body in the beck.”

In the “Reminiscences” of the poet, by the Hon. Mr. Justice Coleridge, which were contributed to the ‘Memoirs of Wordsworth’, written by his nephew (vol. ii. pp. 300-315), there is a record of a walk they took up Easdale to this place, entering the field just at the spot which Dr. Cradock supposes to be “Emma’s Dell.”

“He turned aside at a little farm-house, and took us into a swelling field to look down on the tumbling stream which bounded it, and which we saw precipitated at a distance, in a broad white sheet, from the mountain.” (This refers to Easdale Force.) “Then, as he mused for an instant, he said,

’I have often thought what a solemn thing it would be could we have brought to our mind at once all the scenes of distress and misery which any spot, however beautiful and calm before us, has been witness to since the beginning.  That water break, with the glassy quiet pool beneath it, that looks so lovely, and presents no images to the mind but of peace—­there, I remember, the only son of his father, a poor man who lived