’They flash upon that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude’

to the following effect: 

“The subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it.  The one which follows [A] is strictly a Reverie; and neither that, nor the next after it in succession, ‘Power of Music’, would have been placed here except for the reason given in the foregoing note.”

The being “placed here” refers to its being included among the “Poems of the Imagination.”  The “foregoing note” is the note appended to ’The Horn of Egremont Castle’; and the “reason given” in it is “to avoid a needless multiplication of the Classes” into which Wordsworth divided his poems.  This note of 181? [B], is reprinted mainly to show the difficulties to which Wordsworth was reduced by the artificial method of arrangement referred to.  The following letter to Mr. Wrangham is a more appropriate illustration of the poem of “The Daffodils.”  It was written, the late Bishop of Lincoln says, “sometime afterwards.” (See ’Memoirs of Wordsworth’, vol. i. pp. 183, 184); and, for the whole of the letter, see a subsequent volume of this edition.

  “Grasmere, Nov. 4.

“My dear Wrangham,—­I am indeed much pleased that Mrs. Wrangham and yourself have been gratified by these breathings of simple nature.  You mention Butler, Montagu’s friend; not Tom Butler, but the conveyancer:  when I was in town in spring, he happened to see the volumes lying on Montagu’s mantelpiece, and to glance his eye upon the very poem of ‘The Daffodils.’  ‘Aye,’ says he, ’a fine morsel this for the Reviewers.’  When this was told me (for I was not present) I observed that there were ‘two lines’ in that little poem which, if thoroughly felt, would annihilate nine-tenths of the reviews of the kingdom, as they would find no readers.  The lines I alluded to were these: 

    ’They flash upon that inward eye
    Which is the bliss of solitude.’”

These two lines were composed by Mrs. Wordsworth.  In 1877 the daffodils were still growing in abundance on the shore of Ullswater, below Gowbarrow Park.

Compare the last four lines of James Montgomery’s poem, ’The Little Cloud’: 

  ’Bliss in possession will not last: 
  Remembered joys are never past: 
  At once the fountain, stream, and sea,
  They were—­they are—­they yet shall be.’

Ed.

[Footnote A:  It was ’The Reverie of Poor Susan’.—­Ed.]

[Footnote B:  This is an error in the original printed text.  Evidently a year before the above-mentioned publication in 1815:  one of 1810-1815. text Ed.]

* * * * *

THE AFFLICTION OF MARGARET—­[A]

Composed 1804.—­Published 1807