This, as well as the preceding and the two that follow, were composed in front of Rydal Mount, and during my walks in the neighbourhood.  Nine-tenths of my verses have been murmured out in the open air.  And here let me repeat what I believe has already appeared in print.  One day a stranger, having walked round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked of one of the female servants, who happened to be at the door, permission to see her master’s Study.  ‘This,’ said she, leading him forward, ’is my master’s library, where he keeps his books; but his study is out of doors.’  After a long absence from home, it has more than once happened that some one of my cottage neighbours (not of the double-coach-house cottages) has said, ’Well, there he is; we are glad to hear him booing about again.’  Once more, in excuse for so much egotism, let me say these notes are written for my familiar friends, and at their earnest request.  Another time a gentleman, whom James had conducted through the grounds, asked him what kind of plants throve best there.  After a little consideration, he answered, ‘Laurels.’  ‘That is,’ said the stranger, ’as it should be.  Don’t you know that the laurel is the emblem of poetry, and that poets used, on public occasions, to be crowned with it?’ James stared when the question was first put, but was doubtless much pleased with the information.

443. *_Ibid._

The discerning reader who is aware that in the poem of ‘Ellen Irwin’ I was desirous of throwing the reader at once out of the old ballad, so as if possible to preclude a comparison between that mode of dealing with the subject and the mode I meant to adopt, may here, perhaps, perceive that this poem originated in the four last lines of the first stanza.  These specks of snow reflected in the lake, and so transferred, as it were, to the subaqueous sky, reminded me of the swans which the fancy of the ancient classic poets yoked to the car of Venus.  Hence the tenor of the whole first stanza and the name of Lycoris, which with some readers, who think mythology and classical allusion too far-fetched, and therefore more or less unnatural or affected, will tend to unrealise the sentiment that pervades these verses.  But surely one who has written so much in verse as I have done may be allowed to retrace his steps into the regions of fancy which delighted him in his boyhood, when he first became acquainted with the Greek and Roman Poets.  Before I read Virgil I was so strongly attached to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses I read at school, that I was quite in a passion whenever I found him, in books of criticism, placed below Virgil.  As to Homer, I was never weary of travelling over the scenes through which he led me.  Classical literature affected me by its own beauty.  But the truths of Scripture having been entrusted to the dead languages, and these fountains having been recently laid open at the Reformation, an importance and a sanctity were at that period attached to classical literature that