k, which one passes immediately on entering the common,
going up Green-head Ghyll. It is now "finished," and used when required.
There are remains of walling, much higher up the ghyll; but these are
probably the work of miners, formerly engaged there. Michael's cottage
had been destroyed when the poem was written, in 1800. It stood where
the coach-house and stables of "the Hollins" now stand. But one who
visits Green-head Ghyll, and wishes to realize Michael in his old
age--as described in this poem--should ascend the ghyll till it almost
reaches the top of Fairfield; where the old man, during eighty years,

'had learned the meaning of all winds,
Of blasts of every tone,'

and where he

'had been alone,
Amid the heart of many thousand mists,
That came to him, and left him, on the heights.'

By so doing he will be better able to realize the spirit of the poem,
than by trying to identify the site either of the "unfinished
sheep-fold," or of the house named the "Evening Star." What Wordsworth
said to the Hon. Mr. Justice Coleridge in reference to 'The Brothers'
has been quoted in the note to that poem, p. 203. On the same occasion
he remarked, in reference to 'Michael':

"'Michael' was founded on the son of an old couple having become
dissolute, and run away from his parents; and on an old shepherd
having been seven years in building up a sheep-fold in a solitary
valley."

('Memoirs of Wordsworth', by the late Bishop of Lincoln, vol. ii. p.
305.)

The following extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal, show
the carefulness with which the poem 'Michael' was composed, and the
frequent revisions which it underwent:

'Oct. 11 [1800.] "We walked up Green-head ghyll in search of a
sheepfold.... The sheepfold is falling away. It is built nearly in the
form of a heart unequally divided."

13. "William composing in the evening."

15. "W. composed a little." ... "W. again composed at the sheepfold
after dinner."

18. "W. worked all the morning at the sheepfold, but in vain. He lay
down till 7 o'clock, but did not sleep."

19. "William got to work."

20. "W. worked in the morning at the sheepfold."

21. "W. had been unsuccessful in the morning at the sheepfold."

22. "W. composed, without much success, at the sheepfold."

23. "W. was not successful in composition in the evening."

24. "W. was only partly successful in composition."

26. "W. co