dews, and silent night;
And steady bliss, and all the loves
Now sleeping in these peaceful groves. 10

I heard a Stock-dove sing or say
His homely tale, this very day;
His voice was buried among trees,
Yet to be come-at by the breeze:
He did not cease; but cooed--and cooed; 15
And somewhat pensively he wooed:
He sang of love, with quiet blending,
Slow to begin, and never ending;
Of serious faith, and inward glee;
That was the song--the song for me! 20

Mrs. Wordsworth corrected her husband's note to Miss Fenwick, by adding
in the MS., "at Coleorton"; and at Coleorton the Wordsworths certainly
spent the winter of 1806, the Town-end Cottage at Grasmere being too
small for their increasing household. It is more likely that Wordsworth
wrote the poem at Coleorton than at Grasmere, and it looks as if it had
been an evening impromptu, after hearing both the nightingale and the
stock-dove. There are no nightingales at Grasmere,--they are not heard
further north than the Trent valley,--while they used to abound in the
"peaceful groves" of Coleorton. If the locality was--as Mrs. Wordsworth
states--Coleorton, and if the lines were written after hearing the
nightingale, the year would be 1807, and not 1806 (the poet's own date).
The nightingale is a summer visitor in this country, and could not have
been heard by Wordsworth at Coleorton in 1806, as he did not go south to
Leicestershire till November in that year. But it is quite possible that
it was "the stock-dove's voice" that alone suggested the lines, and that
they were written either in 1806, or (as I think more likely), very
early in 1807. In the month of January Wordsworth was corresponding with
Scott about the poems in this edition of 1807.--ED.

VARIANTS:

[1] 1807.

A Creature of ebullient heart:-- 1815.

The text of 1820 returns to that of 1807.[C]

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See Shakespeare's _King Henry VI._, Part III., act I. scene iv. l.
87.--ED.

[B] Compare the lines in _The Cuckoo and the Nightingale_, vol. ii. p.
255--

I heard the lusty Nightingale so sing,
That her clear voice made a loud rioting,
Echoing through all the green wood wide. ED.

[C] Henry Crabb Robinson, in his _Diary_ (May 9, 1815), anticipates this
return to the text of 1807.--ED.

"THOUGH NARROW BE THAT OL