not promised in my birth.'

Ed.]

[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.]

[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.]

[Footnote p: Snowdrops st