which leads me to believe that the poem
may have been begun in 1800, and that the first part, ending (as it did
then) with the line:

'While she is travelling through the dreary sea,'

may have been finished before John Wordsworth left Grasmere;
the second part being written afterwards, while he was at sea;
and that this is the explanation of the date given in the editions
of 1815 and 1820, viz. 1802.

Passages occur in Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal to the
following effect:

"Monday Morning, 1st September.--We walked in the wood by the lake.
William read 'Joanna' and 'the Firgrove' to Coleridge."

A little earlier there is the record,

"Saturday, 22nd August.--William was composing all the morning....
William read us the poem of 'Joanna' beside the Rothay by the
roadside."

Then, on Friday, the 25th August, there is the entry,

"We walked over the hill by the Firgrove, I sate upon a rock and
observed a flight of swallows gathering together high above my head.
We walked through the wood to the stepping stones, the lake of Rydale
very beautiful, partly still, I left William to compose an
inscription, that about the path...."

Then, next day,

"Saturday morning, 30th August.--William finished his inscription of
the Pathway, then walked in the wood, and when John returned he sought
him, and they bathed together."

To what poem Dorothy Wordsworth referred under the name of the
"Inscription of the Pathway" has puzzled me much. There is no poem
amongst his "Inscriptions" (written in or before August 1800) that
corresponds to it in the least. But, if my conjecture is right that this
"Poem on the Naming of Places," beginning:

'When, to the attractions of the busy world,'

was composed at two different times, it is quite possible that "the
Firgrove" which was read--along with 'Joanna'--to Coleridge on September
1st, 1800, was the first part of this very poem.

If this supposition is correct, some light is cast both on the
"Inscription of the Pathway." and on the date assigned by Wordsworth
himself to the poem. There is a certain fitness, however, in this poem
being placed--as it now is--in sequence to the 'Elegiac Verses' in
memory of John Wordsworth, beginning, "The Sheep-boy whistled loud," and
near the fourth poem 'To the Daisy', beginning, "Sweet Flower! belike
one day to have."

The "Fir-grove" still exists. It is between Wishing Gate and White Moss
Common, and almost exactl