Footnote A:   See the De Quincey Memorials, vol. i. p. 125.—Ed.
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Footnote B:   A poem on his brother John.—Ed.
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Footnote C:  Compare

"A beautiful white cloud of foam at momentary intervals, coursed by the side of the vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a Tartar troop over a wilderness."

S. T. C. in Biographia Literaria, Satyrane's Letters, letter i. p. 196 (edition 1817).—Ed.

Footnote A:   On the authority of the poet's nephew, and others, the "city" here referred to has invariably been supposed to be Goslar, where he spent the winter of 1799. Goslar, however, is as unlike a "vast city" as it is possible to conceive. Wordsworth could have walked from end to end of it in ten minutes.

One would think he was rather referring to London, but there is no evidence to show that he visited the metropolis in the spring of 1799. The lines which follow about "the open fields" (l. 50) are certainly more appropriate to a journey from London to Sockburn, than from Goslar to Gottingen; and what follows, the "green shady place" of l. 62, the "known Vale" and the "cottage" of ll. 72 and 74, certainly refer to English soil.—Ed.
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Footnote B:   Compare Paradise Lost, xii. l. 646.

'The world was all before them, where to choose.'

Ed.
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Footnote C:  Compare [volume 2 link: Lines composed above Tintern Abbey], ll. 52-5 (vol. ii. p. 53.)—Ed.
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Footnote D:   S. T. Coleridge.—Ed.
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Footnote E:  At Sockburn-on-Tees, county Durham, seven miles south-east of Darlington.—Ed.
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Footnote F:  Grasmere.—Ed.
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Footnote G:   Dove Cottage at Town-end.—Ed.
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Footnote H:  This quotation I am unable to trace.—Ed.
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Footnote I:   Wordsworth spent most of the year 1799 (from March to December) at Sockburn with the Hutchinsons. With Coleridge and his brother John he went to Windermere, Rydal, Grasmere, etc., in the autumn, returning afterwards to Sockburn. He left it again, with his sister, on Dec. 19, to settle at Grasmere, and they reached Dove Cottage on Dec. 21, 1799.—Ed.
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Footnote K:   See Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, passim.—Ed.
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Footnote L:   Compare the 2nd and 3rd of the [Volume 2 links: Stanzas written in my pocket-copy of Thomson's Castle of Indolence, vol. ii. p. 306, and the note] appended to that poem.—Ed.



Footnote M:   Mithridates (the Great) of Pontus, 131 B.C. to 63 B.C. Vanquished by Pompey, B.C. 65, he fled to his son-in-law, Tigranes, in Armenia. Being refused an asylum, he committed suicide. I cannot trace the legend of Mithridates becoming Odin. Probably Wordsworth means that he would invent, rather than "relate," the story. Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. x.) says,

"It is supposed that Odin was the chief of a tribe of barbarians, who dwelt on the banks of Lake Maeotis, till the fall of Mithridates, and the arms of Pompey menaced the north with servitude; that Odin, yielding with indignant fury to a power which he was unable to resist, conducted his tribe from the frontiers of Asiatic Sarmatia into Sweden."

See also Mallet, Northern Antiquities, and Crichton and Wheaton's Scandinavia (Edinburgh Cabinet Library):

"Among the fugitive princes of Scythia, who were expelled from their country in the Mithridatic war, tradition has placed the name of Odin, the ruler of a potent tribe in Turkestan, between the Euxine and the Caspian."

Ed.
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Footnote N:   Sertorius, one of the Roman generals of the later Republican era (see Plutarch's biography of him, and Corneille's tragedy). On being proscribed by Sylla, he fled from Etruria to Spain; there he became the leader of several bands of exiles, and repulsed the Roman armies sent against him. Mithridates VI.—referred to in the previous note—aided him, both with ships and money, being desirous of establishing a new Roman Republic in Spain. From Spain he went to Mauritania. In the Straits of Gibraltar he met some sailors, who had been in the Atlantic Isles, and whose reports made him wish to visit these islands.—Ed.
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Footnote O:  Supposed to be the Canaries.—Ed.
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Footnote P:  

"In the early part of the fifteenth century there arrived at Lisbon an old bewildered pilot of the seas, who had been driven by tempests he knew not whither, and raved about an island in the far deep upon which he had landed, and which he had found peopled, and adorned with noble cities. The inhabitants told him that they were descendants of a band of Christians who fled from Spain when that country was conquered by the Moslems."

(See Washington Irving's Chronicles of Wolfert's Roost, etc.; and Baring Gould's Curious Myths of the Middle Ages.)—Ed.
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Footnote Q:  Dominique de Gourgues, a French gentleman, who went in 1568 to Florida, to avenge the massacre of the French by the Spaniards there. (Mr. Carter, in the edition of 1850.)—Ed.
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Footnote R:   Gustavus I. of Sweden. In the course of his war with Denmark he retreated to Dalecarlia, where he was a miner and field labourer.—Ed.
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Footnote S:  The name—both as Christian and surname—is common in Scotland, and towns (such as Wallacetown, Ayr) are named after him.

"Passed two of Wallace's caves. There is scarcely a noted glen in Scotland that has not a cave for Wallace, or some other hero."

Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland in 1803 (Sunday, August 21).—Ed.
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Footnote T:  Compare L'Allegro, l. 137.—Ed.
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Footnote U:   Compare Paradise Lost, iii. 17.—Ed.
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Footnote V:   The Derwent, on which the town of Cockermouth is built, where Wordsworth was born on the 7th of April 1770.—Ed.
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Footnote W:   The towers of Cockermouth Castle.—Ed.
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Footnote X:  The "terrace walk" is at the foot of the garden, attached to the old mansion in which Wordsworth's father, law-agent of the Earl of Lonsdale, resided. This home of his childhood is alluded to in [Volume 2 link: The Sparrow's Nest], vol. ii. p. 236. Three of the "Poems, composed or suggested during a Tour, in the Summer of 1833," refer to Cockermouth. They are the fifth, sixth, and seventh in that series of Sonnets: and are entitled respectively To the River Derwent; In sight of the Town of Cockermouth; and the Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle. It was proposed some time ago that this house—which is known in Cockermouth as "Wordsworth House," —should be purchased, and since the Grammar School of the place is out of repair, that it should be converted into a School, in memory of Wordsworth. This excellent suggestion has not yet been carried out—Ed.
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Footnote Y:  The Vale of Esthwaite.—Ed.
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Footnote Z:   He went to Hawkshead School in 1778.—Ed.
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Footnote a:  About mid October the autumn crocus in the garden "snaps" in that district.—Ed.
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Footnote b:  Possibly in the Claife and Colthouse heights to the east of Esthwaite Water; but more probably the round-headed grassy hills that lead up and on to the moor between Hawkshead and Coniston, where the turf is always green and smooth.—Ed.
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Footnote c:   Yewdale: see next note. "Cultured Vale" exactly describes the little oat-growing valley of Yewdale.—Ed.
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Footnote d:  As there are no "naked crags" with "half-inch fissures in the slippery rocks" in the "cultured vale" of Esthwaite, the locality referred to is probably the Hohne Fells above Yewdale, to the north of Coniston, and only a few miles from Hawkshead, where a crag, now named Raven's Crag, divides Tilberthwaite from Yewdale. In his Epistle to Sir George Beaumont, Wordsworth speaks of Yewdale as a plain

            'spread
Under a rock too steep for man to tread,
Where sheltered from the north and bleak north-west
Aloft the Raven hangs a visible nest,
Fearless of all assaults that would her brood molest.'

Ed.
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Footnote e:   Dr. Cradock suggested the reading "rocky cove." Rocky cave is tautological, and Wordsworth would hardly apply the epithet to an ordinary boat-house.—Ed.
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Footnote f:   The "craggy steep till then the horizon's bound," is probably the ridge of Ironkeld, reaching from high Arnside to the Tom Heights above Tarn Hows; while the "huge peak, black and huge, as if with voluntary power instinct," may he either the summit of Wetherlam, or of Pike o'Blisco. Mr. Rawnsley, however, is of opinion that if Wordsworth rowed off from the west bank of Fasthwaite, he might see beyond the craggy ridge of Loughrigg the mass of Nab-Scar, and Rydal Head would rise up "black and huge." If he rowed from the east side, then Pike o'Stickle, or Harrison Stickle, might rise above Ironkeld, over Borwick Ground.—Ed.
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Footnote g:   Compare S. T. Coleridge.

"When very many are skating together, the sounds and the noises give an impulse to the icy trees, and the woods all round the lake tinkle."

The Friend, vol. ii. p. 325 (edition 1818).—Ed.
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Footnote h:   The two preceding paragraphs were published in The Friend, December 28, 1809, under the title of the Growth of Genius from the Influences of Natural Objects on the Imagination, in Boyhood and Early Youth, and were afterwards inserted in all the collective editions of Wordsworth's poems, from 1815 onwards. For the changes of the text in these editions, [volume 2 link: see seqq.] vol. ii. pp. 66-69.—Ed.
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Footnote i:   The becks amongst the Furness Fells, in Yewdale, and elsewhere.—Ed.
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Footnote j:   Possibly from the top of some of the rounded moraine hills on the western side of the Hawkshead Valley.—Ed.
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Footnote k:  The pupils in the Hawkshead school, in Wordsworth's time, boarded in the houses of village dames. Wordsworth lived with one Anne Tyson, for whom he ever afterwards cherished the warmest regard, and whose simple character he has immortalised. (See especially in the fourth book of The Prelude, p. 187, etc.) Wordsworth lived in her cottage at Hawkshead during nine eventful years. It still remains externally unaltered, and little, if at all, changed in the interior. It may be reached through a picturesque archway, near the principal inn of the village (The Lion); and is on the right of a small open yard, which is entered through this archway. To the left, a lane leads westwards to the open country. It is a humble dwelling of two storeys. The floor of the basement flat-paved with the blue flags of Coniston slate —is not likely to have been changed since Wordsworth's time. The present door with its "latch" (see book ii. l. 339), is probably the same as that referred to in the poem, as in use in 1776, and onwards. For further details see notes to book iv.—Ed.
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Footnote l:  Compare Pope's Rape of the Lock, canto iii. l. 54:

'Gained but one trump, and one plebeian card.'

Ed.
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Footnote m:   Compare Walton's Compleat Angler, part i. 4:

'I was for that time lifted above earth,
And possess'd joys not promised in my birth.'

Ed.
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Footnote n:   The notes to this edition are explanatory rather than critical; but as this image has been objected to—as inaccurate, and out of all analogy with Wordsworth's use and wont—it may be mentioned that the noise of the breaking up of the ice, after a severe winter in these lakes, when it cracks and splits in all directions, is exactly as here described. It is not of course, in any sense peculiar to the English lakes; but there are probably few districts where the peculiar noise referred to can be heard so easily or frequently. Compare Coleridge's account of the Lake of Ratzeburg in winter, in The Friend, vol. ii. p. 323 (edition of 1818), and his reference to "the thunders and 'howlings' of the breaking ice."—Ed.
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Footnote o:   I here insert a very remarkable MS. variation of the text, or rather (I think) one of these experiments in dealing with his theme, which were common with Wordsworth. I found it in a copy of the Poems belonging to the poet's son:

I tread the mazes of this argument, and paint
How nature by collateral interest
And by extrinsic passion peopled first
My mind with beauteous objects: may I well
Forget what might demand a loftier song,
For oft the Eternal Spirit, He that has
His Life in unimaginable things,
And he who painting what He is in all
The visible imagery of all the World
Is yet apparent chiefly as the Soul
Of our first sympathies—O bounteous power
In Childhood, in rememberable days
How often did thy love renew for me
Those naked feelings which, when thou would'st form
A living thing, thou sendest like a breeze
Into its infant being! Soul of things
How often did thy love renew for me
Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense
Which seem in their simplicity to own
An intellectual charm: That calm delight
Which, if I err not, surely must belong
To those first-born affinities which fit
Our new existence to existing things,
And, in our dawn of being, constitute
The bond of union betwixt life and joy.
Yes, I remember, when the changeful youth
And twice five seasons on my mind had stamped
The faces of the moving year, even then
A child, I held unconscious intercourse
With the eternal beauty, drinking in
A pure organic pleasure from the lines
Of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse
Of waters coloured by the clouds of Heaven.

Ed.
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Footnote p:  Snowdrops still grow abundantly in many an orchard and meadow by the road which skirts the western side of Esthwaite Lake.—Ed.
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Footnote q:   Compare the Ode, Intimations of Immortality, stanza ix.—Ed.
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Contents—The Prelude
Main Contents

Book Second

Footnote A:   The "square" of the "small market village" of Hawkshead still remains; and the presence of the new "assembly-room" does not prevent us from realising it as open, with the "rude mass of native rock left midway" in it—the "old grey stone," which was the centre of the village sports.—Ed.
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Footnote B:  Compare The Excursion, book ix. ll. 487-90:

'When, on thy bosom, spacious Windermere!
A Youth, I practised this delightful art;
Tossed on the waves alone, or 'mid a crew
Of joyous comrades.'

Ed.
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Footnote C:   Compare The Excursion, book ix. l. 544, describing "a fair Isle with birch-trees fringed," where they gathered leaves of that shy plant (its flower was shed), the lily of the vale.—Ed.
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Footnote D:  These islands in Windermere are easily identified. In the Lily of the Valley Island the plant still grows, though not abundantly; but from Lady Holme the

'ruins of a shrine
Once to Our Lady dedicate'

have disappeared as completely as the shrine in St. Herbert's Island, Derwentwater. The third island:

'musical with birds,
That sang and ceased not—'

may have been House Holme, or that now called Thomson's Holme. It could hardly have been Belle Isle; since, from its size, it could not be described as a "Sister Isle" to the one where the lily of the valley grew "beneath the oaks' umbrageous covert."—Ed.
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Footnote E:  Doubtless the circle was at Conishead Priory, on the Cartmell Sands; or that in the vale of Swinside, on the north-east side of Black Combe; more probably the former. The whole district is rich in Druidical remains, but Wordsworth would not refer to the Keswick circle, or to Long Meg and her Daughters in this connection; and the proximity of the temple on the Cartmell Shore to the Furness Abbey ruins, and the ease with which it could be visited on holidays by the boys from Hawkshead school, make it almost certain that he refers to it.—Ed.
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Footnote F:   Furness Abbey, founded by Stephen in 1127, in the glen of the deadly Nightshade—Bekansghyll—so called from the luxuriant abundance of the plant, and dedicated to St. Mary. (Compare West's Antiquities of Furness.) —Ed.
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Footnote G:   What was the belfry is now a mass of detached ruins.—Ed.
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Footnote H:  Doubtless the Cartmell Sands beyond Ulverston, at the estuary of the Leven.—Ed.
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Footnote I:   At Bowness.—Ed.
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Footnote K:  The White Lion Inn at Bowness.—Ed.
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Footnote L:   Compare the reference to the "rude piece of self-taught art," at the Swan Inn, in the first canto of The Waggoner, p. 81. William Hutchinson, in his Excursion to the Lakes in 1773 and 1774 (second edition, 1776, p. 185), mentions "the White Lion Inn at Bownas."—Ed.
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Footnote M:   Dr. Cradock told me that William Hutchinson—referred to in the previous note—describes "Bownas church and its cottages," as seen from the lake, arising "'above the trees'." Wordsworth, reversing the view, sees "gleams of water through the trees and 'over the tree tops'"—another instance of minutely exact description.—Ed.
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Footnote N:   Robert Greenwood, afterwards Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.—Ed.
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Footnote O:  Compare [Volume 2 link: Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey], vol. ii. p. 51.—Ed.
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Footnote P:  Wetherlam, or Coniston Old Man, or both.—Ed.
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Footnote Q:  

"The moon, as it hung over the southernmost shore of Esthwaite, with Gunner's How, as seen from Hawkshead rising up boldly to the spectator's left hand, would be thus described."

(H. D. Rawnsley.)—Ed.
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Footnote R:   Esthwaite. Compare [Volume 2 link: Peter Bell] (vol. ii. p. 13):

'Where deep and low the hamlets lie
Beneath their little patch of sky
And little lot of stars.'

Ed.
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Footnote S:   See in the Appendix to this volume, Note II, p. 388.—Ed.
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Footnote T:   See Paradise Lost, ix. l. 249.—Ed.
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Footnote U:   The daily work in Hawkshead School began—by Archbishop Sandys' ordinance—at 6 A.M. in summer, and 7 A.M. in winter.—Ed.
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Footnote V:  Esthwaite.—Ed.
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Footnote W:   The Rev. John Fleming, of Rayrigg, Windermere, or, possibly, the Rev. Charles Farish, author of The Minstrels of Winandermere and Black Agnes. Mr. Carter, who edited The Prelude in 1850, says it was the former, but this is not absolutely certain.—Ed.
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Footnote X:   A "cottage latch"—probably the same as that in use in Dame Tyson's time—is still on the door of the house where she lived at Hawkshead.—Ed.
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Footnote Y:  Probably on the western side of the Vale, above the village. There is but one "'jutting' eminence" on this side of the valley. It is an old moraine, now grass-covered; and, from this point, the view both of the village and of the vale is noteworthy. The jutting eminence, however, may have been a crag, amongst the Colthouse heights, to the north-east of Hawkshead.—Ed.
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Footnote Z:   Compare in the Ode, Intimations of Immortality:

'... those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,' etc.

Ed.
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Footnote a:   Coleridge's school days were spent at Christ's Hospital in London. With the above line compare S. T. C.'s Frost at Midnight:

'I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim.'

Ed.
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Footnote b:  Compare [Volume 2 link: Stanzas written in my Pocket Copy of Thomsons "Castle of Indolence,"] vol. ii. p. 305.—Ed.
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Contents—The Prelude
Main Contents