recognise figures which have struck out a fancy, on occasion, that though truly enough thus derived, yet would be preposterous as a copy, so, though I dare not deny the original of my little poem, I altogether refuse to have it considered as the “very effigies” of such a moral and intellectual superiority.

     Faithfully yours,

     ROBERT BROWNING.’

The Editor cannot close this Preface without expressing his sense of the greatness of the trust confided to him, and the personal benefit it has been to himself to have been brought so near to WILLIAM WORDSWORTH as he has been in working on this collection of his Prose.  He felt almost awed as he handled the great and good man’s MSS., and found himself behind the screen (as it were), seeing what he had seen, touching what he had touched, knowing what he had known, feeling what he had felt.  Reverence, even veneration is an empty word to utter the emotion excited in such communion; these certainly, but something tenderer and more human were in head and heart.  It was a grand, high-thoughted, pure-lived, unique course that was run in those sequestered vales.  The closer one gets to the man, the greater he proves, the truer, the simpler; and it is a benediction to the race, amid so many fragmentary and jagged and imperfect lives, to have one so rounded and completed, so august and so genuine: 

    ’Summon Detraction to object the worst
    That may be told, and utter all it can;
    It cannot find a blemish to be enforced
    Against him, other than he was a man,
    And built of flesh and blood, and did live here,
    Within the region of infirmity;
    Where all perfections never did appear
    To meet in any one so really,
    But that his frailty ever did bewray
    Unto the world that he was set in clay.’

(Funeral Panegyric on the Earl of Devonshire, by Samuel Daniel.)

     ALEXANDER B. GROSART.

Park View, Blackburn, Lancashire.

NOTE.—­It is perhaps right to mention, for Editor and present Printers’ sake, that WORDSWORTH’S own capitals, italics, punctuation, and other somewhat antique characteristics, have been faithfully reproduced.  At the dates, capitals, italics, and punctuation were more abundant than at present. G.

CONTENTS OF VOL.  I.

*** A star [*] designates publication herein for the first time.   G.
=PAGE=
The Dedication to the Queen                                        v
Poem addressed to her Majesty with a Gift-copy of the Poems.      vi
The Preface                                               vii-xxxviii

POLITICAL.