II.  POEMS REFERRING TO THE PERIOD OF CHILDHOOD.

27. *_My Heart leaps up when I behold_. [I.]

This was written at Grasmere, Town-End, 1804.

28. *_To a Butterfly_. [II.]

Grasmere, Town-End.  Written in the Orchard, 1801.  My sister and I were parted immediately after the death of our mother, who died in 1777, both being very young. [Corrected in pencil on opposite page—­’ March 1778.’]

29. *_The Sparrow’s Nest_, [III.]

The Orchard, Grasmere, Town-End, 1801.  At the end of the garden of my Father’s house at Cockermouth was a high terrace that commanded a fine view of the river Derwent and Cockermouth Castle.  This was our favourite play-ground.  The terrace wall, a low one, was covered with closely-clipt privet and roses, which gave an almost impervious shelter to birds that built their nests there.  The latter of these stanzas alludes to one of these nests.

30. *_Foresight_, [IV.]

Also composed in the Orchard, Grasmere, Town-End.

31. *_Characteristics of a Child three Years old_. [V.]

Picture of my daughter Catharine, who died the year after.  Written at
Allan-Bank, Grasmere, 1811.

32. *_Address to a Child_, [VI.]

During a boisterous Winter’s Evening.  Town-End, Grasmere, 1806.

33. *_The Mother’s Return_, [VII.]

Ditto.  By Miss Wordsworth [i.e. both poems].

34. *_Alice Fell; or Poverty_. [VIII.]

1801.  Written to gratify Mr. Graham, of Glasgow, brother of the Author of ‘The Sabbath.’  He was a zealous coadjutor of Mr. Clarkson, and a man of ardent humanity.  The incident had happened to himself, and he urged me to put it into verse for humanity’s sake.  The humbleness, meanness if you like, of the subject, together with the homely mode of treating it, brought upon me a world of ridicule by the small critics, so that in policy I excluded it from many editions of my Poems, till it was restored at the request of some of my friends, in particular my son-in-law, Edward Quillinan.

35. *_Lucy Gray; or Solitude_. [IX.]

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 the 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 spiritualising 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.