Variant 101:
 
1820
Distraction reigns in soul and sense,
And reason drops in impotence
From her deserted pinnacle!

1820
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Variant 102:
 
1820
... ears ...
 1819
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Variant 103:
 
1836
Though clamorous as a hunter's horn
Re-echoed from a naked rock,
'Tis from that tabernacle—List!


1819
The voice, though clamorous as a horn
Re-echoed by a naked rock,
Is from ....
1832
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Variant 104:
 
1819
... pious ...
 C.
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Variant 105:
 
1836
'Tis said, that through prevailing grace
 1819
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Variant 106:
 
1836
... shoulders scored
Meek beast! in memory of the Lord

1819
Faithful memorial of the Lord
C.
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Variant 107:
 
1836
In memory of that solemn day
 1819
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Variant 108:
 
1836
Towards a gate in open view
Turns up a narrow lane; ...

1819
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Variant 109:
 
1836
Had gone two hundred yards, not more;
When to a lonely house he came;
He turn'd aside towards the same
And stopp'd before the door.


1819
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Variant 110:
 
1836
In hope ...
1819
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Variant 111:
 
1827
Close at ...
1819
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Variant 112:
 
1832
What could he do?—The Woman lay
 1819
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Variant 113:
 
1836
... the sufferer ...
1819
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Variant 114:
 
1819
... stair ...
1820
The edition of 1827 returns to the text of 1819.

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Variant 115:
 
1836
And to the pillow gives ...
 1819
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Variant 116:
 
1827
And resting on ...
1819
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Variant 117:
 
1827
He turns ...
1819
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Variant 118:
 
1836
... his inward grief and fear—
1819
... his sorrow and his fear—
C.
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Variant 119:
 
1827
... had ...
1819
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Variant 120:
 
1836
Towards ...
1819
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Variant 121:
 
1832
... repressed ...
 1819
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Footnote A:
 
The title in the two editions of 1819 was Peter Bell: A Tale in Verse. —Ed.

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Footnote B:
  In Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden Journal the following occurs, under date April 20, 1798:
"The moon crescent. Peter Bell begun."
Ed.

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Footnote C:
 
Romeo and Juliet, act II. scene ii. l. 44. This motto first appeared on the half-title of Peter Bell, second edition, 1819, under the advertisement of Benjamin the Waggoner, its first line being "What's a Name?" When The Waggoner appeared, a few days afterwards, the motto stood on its title-page. In the collective edition of the Poems (1820), it disappeared; but reappeared, in its final position, in the edition of 1827.—Ed.

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Footnote D:
 
Julius Cæsar, act I. scene ii. l. 147.—Ed.

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Footnote E:
 
Compare The Prelude, book iv. l. 47:
'the sunny seat
Round the stone table under the dark pine.'
Ed.

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Footnote F:
  In the dialect of the North, a hawker of earthen-ware is thus designated.—W. W. 1819 (second edition).

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Footnote G:
 
Compare The Prelude, book v. l. 448:
'At last, the dead man, 'mid that beauteous scene
Of trees and hills and water, bolt upright
Rose, with his ghastly face, a spectre shape
Of terror.'
Ed.

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Footnote H:
 
This and the next stanza were omitted from the edition of 1827, but restored in 1832.—Ed.

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Footnote I:
  The notion is very general, that the Cross on the back and shoulders of this Animal has the origin here alluded to.—W. W. 1819.

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Footnote J:
  I cannot suffer this line to pass, without noticing that it was suggested by Mr. Haydon's noble Picture of Christ's Entry into Jerusalem.—W. W. 1820.


Into the same picture Haydon "introduced Wordsworth bowing in reverence and awe." See the essay on "The Portraits of Wordsworth" in a later volume, and the portrait itself, which will be reproduced in the volume containing the Life of the poet.—Ed.

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Footnote K:
 
The first and second editions of Peter Bell (1819) contained, as frontispiece, an engraving by J. C. Bromley, after a picture by Sir George Beaumont. In 1807, Wordsworth wrote to Sir George:
"I am quite delighted to hear of your picture for Peter Bell .... But remember that no poem of mine will ever be popular, and I am afraid that the sale of Peter would not carry the expense of engraving .... The people would love the poem of Peter Bell, but the public (a very different thing) will never love it."
Some days before Wordsworth's Peter Bell was issued in 1819, another 'Peter Bell' was published by Messrs. Taylor and Hessey. It was a parody written by J. Hamilton Reynolds, and issued as 'Peter Bell, a Lyrical Ballad', with the sentence on its title page, "I do affirm that I am the real Simon Pure." The preface, which follows, is too paltry to quote; and the stanzas which make up the poem contain allusions to the more trivial of the early Lyrical Ballads (Betty Foy, Harry Gill, etc.). Wordsworth's Peter Bell was published about a week later; and Shelley afterwards published his Peter Bell the Third. Charles Lamb wrote to Wordsworth, in May 1819:
"Dear Wordsworth—I received a copy of 'Peter Bell' a week ago, and I hope the author will not be offended if I say I do not much relish it. The humour, if it is meant for humour, is forced; and then the price!—sixpence would have been dear for it. Mind, I do not mean your 'Peter Bell', but a Peter Bell, which preceded it about a week, and is in every bookseller's shop window in London, the type and paper nothing differing from the true one, the preface signed W. W., and the supplementary preface quoting, as the author's words, an extract from the supplementary preface to the 'Lyrical Ballads.' Is there no law against these rascals? I would have this Lambert Simnel whipt at the cart's tail."
(The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by A. Ainger, vol. ii. p. 20.)

Barron Field wrote on the title-page of his copy of the edition of Peter Bell, 1819,
"And his carcase was cast in the way, and the ass stood by it."
1 Kings xiii. 24.
—Ed.

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Sub-Footnote a:
 
This stanza, which was deleted from every edition of Peter Bell after the two of 1819, was prefixed by Shelley to his poem of Peter Bell the Third, and many of his contemporaries thought that it was an invention of Shelley's. See the note which follows this poem, p. 50. Crabb Robinson wrote in his Diary, June 6, 1812:
"Mrs. Basil Montagu told me she had no doubt she had suggested this image to Wordsworth by relating to him an anecdote. A person, walking in a friend's garden, looking in at a window, saw a company of ladies at a table near the window, with countenances fixed. In an instant he was aware of their condition, and broke the window. He saved them from incipient suffocation."
Wordsworth subsequently said that he had omitted the stanza only in deference to the "unco guid." Crabb Robinson remonstrated with him against its exclusion.—Ed.

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1798 Contents
Main Contents



LinesA, composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798B

Composed July 1798.—Published 1798

The Poem


[July 1798. No poem of mine was composed under circumstances more pleasant for me to remember than this. I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye, and concluded it just as I was entering Bristol in the evening, after a ramble of four or five days, with my sister. Not a line of it was altered, and not any part of it written down till I reached Bristol. It was published almost immediately after in the little volume of which so much has been said in these Notes, the Lyrical Ballads, as first published at Bristol by Cottle.—I. F.]


Included among the "Poems of the Imagination."—Ed.





The Poem


text variant footnote line number
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
        These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
        If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
        And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
        Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes, Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!



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