WILFRED (approaching MARMADUKE) O my poor Master! MARMADUKE Discerning Monitor, my faithful Wilfred, Why art thou here? 305 [Turning to WALLACE. Wallace, upon these Borders, Many there be whose eyes will not want cause To you, 310 315 By lowly nature reared, as if to make her Whose long-suspended rights are now on the eve SEVERAL OF THE BAND (eagerly) MARMADUKE Captain! No more of that; in silence hear my doom : 320 325 330 In search of nothing, that this earth can give, A Man by pain and thought compelled to live, In Heaven, and Mercy gives me leave to die. 335 In June 1797 Coleridge wrote to his friend Cottle: "W. has written a tragedy himself. I speak with heart-felt sincerity, and, I think, unblinded judgment, when I tell you that I feel myself a little man by his side, and yet I do not think myself a less man than I formerly thought myself. His drama is absolutely wonderful. You know I do not commonly speak in such abrupt and unmingled phrases, and therefore will the more readily believe me. There are in the piece those profound touches of the human heart which I find three or four times in the Robbers of Schiller, and often in Shakspeare; but in W. there are no inequalities." On August 6, 1800, Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge: "I would pay five-and-forty thousand carriages to read W.'s tragedy, of which I have heard so much and seen so little." Shortly afterwards, August 26, he wrote to Coleridge: "I have a sort of a recollection that somebody, I think you, promised me a sight of Wordsworth's tragedy. I shall be very glad of it just now, for I have got Manning with me, and should like to read it with him. But this, I confess, is a refinement. Under any circumstances, alone, in Cold-Bath Prison, or in the desert island, just when Prospero and his crew had set off, with Caliban in a cage, to Milan, it would be a treat to me to read that play. Manning has read it, so has Lloyd, and all Lloyd's family; but I could not get him to betray his trust by giving me a sight of it. Lloyd is sadly deficient in some of those virtuous vices."-ED. THE REVERIE OF POOR SUSAN Composed 1797.-Published 1800 [Written 1801 or 1802. This arose out of my observations of the affecting music of these birds, hanging in this way in the London streets during the freshness and stillness of the spring morning.-I. F.] Placed by Wordsworth among his "Poems of the Imagination."-ED. The preceding Fenwick note to this poem is manifestly inaccurate as to date, since the poem is printed in the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1800. In the edition of 1836 the date of composition is given as 1797, and this date is followed by Mr. Carter, the editor of 1857. Miss Wordsworth's Journal gives no date; and, as the Fenwick note is certainly incorrect—and the poem must have been written before the edition of 1800 came outit seems best to trust to the date sanctioned by Wordsworth himself in 1836, and followed by his literary executor in 1857. I think it probable that the poem was written during the short visit which Wordsworth and his sister paid to their brother Richard in London in 1797, when he tried to get his tragedy, The Borderers, brought on the stage. The title of the poem from 1800 to 1805 was Poor Susan.—ED. AT the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush1 that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. She sees 5 'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? 1 1820. There's a Thrush 1800. Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, 1798 A NIGHT PIECE Composed 1798.-Published 1815 ΙΟ 15 [Composed on the road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, extempore. I distinctly recollect the very moment when I was struck, as described,—' He looks up, the clouds are split,' etc.-I. F.] Classed by Wordsworth among his ation."-ED. "Poems of the Imagin -THE sky is overcast With a continuous cloud of texture close, The only one 1800. 2 The following stanza, in the edition of 1800, was omitted in subsequent ones : Poor Outcast! return-to receive thee once more And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown, May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own.† * Wordsworth originally wrote 66 sees.' S. T. C. suggested "views."-Ed. "Susan stood for the representative of poor Rus in urbe.' There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten; 'bright volumes of vapour,' etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her 'a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express."-Charles Lamb to Wordsworth. See The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i., p. 287.-ED. A dull, contracted circle, yielding light So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls, Chequering the ground—from rock, plant, tree, or tower. Startles the pensive traveller while 1 he treads 5 10 Bent earthwards; he looks up—the clouds are split The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. But they are silent ;-still they roll along Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds, At length the Vision closes; and the mind, 15 20 25 *The indebtedness of the Poet to his Sister is nowhere more conspicuous than in this Poem. In Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxden Journal the following occurs, under date 25th January 1798: "Went to Poole's after tea. The sky spread over with one continuous cloud, whitened by the light of the moon, which, though her dim shape was seen, did not throw forth so strong a light as to chequer the earth with shadows. At once the clouds seemed to cleave asunder, and lift her in the centre of a black-blue vault. She sailed along, followed by multitudes of stars, small, and bright, and sharp; their brightness seemed concentrated."-ED. WE ARE SEVEN Composed 1798.-Published 1798 [Written at Alfoxden in the spring of 1798, under circumstances somewhat remarkable. The little girl who is the heroine, I met within the area of Goodrich Castle in the year 1793. Having left the Isle of Wight, and crost Salisbury Plain, as 1 1827. as 1815. |