Coleridge. I re-examined it in 1894, and added several readings, which I
had omitted to note twelve years ago, when Lord Coleridge first showed
it to me. I should add that, since the issue of the volumes of 1882-6,
many other MS. copies of individual Poems have come under my notice; and
that every important variation of text in them is incorporated in this
edition.

As it is impossible to discover the precise year in which the suggested
alterations of text were written by Wordsworth, on the margin of the
edition of 1836, they will be indicated, wherever they occur, by the
initial letter C. Comparatively few changes occur in the poems of early
years.

A copy of the 1814 (quarto) edition of 'The Excursion', now in the
possession of a grandson of the poet, the Rev. John Wordsworth, Gosforth
Rectory, Cumberland--which was the copy Wordsworth kept at Rydal Mount
for annotation and correction, much in the same way as he kept the
edition of 1836-7--has also been kindly sent to me by its present owner,
for examination and use in this edition; and, in it, I have found some
additional readings.


FOURTH. In the present edition all the Notes and Memoranda, explanatory
of the Poems, which Wordsworth dictated to Miss Fenwick, are given in
full. Miss Fenwick lived much at Rydal Mount, during the later years of
the Poet's life; and it is to their friendship, and to her inducing
Wordsworth to dictate these Notes, that we owe most of the information
we possess, as to the occasions and circumstances under which his poems
were composed. These notes were first made use of--although only in a
fragmentary manner--by the late Bishop of Lincoln, in the 'Memoirs' of