And here are some verses that have interest from the glimpse they give of Wordsworth's faculty in a field that he declined to cultivate--the amatory or "fleshly," as it has been conveniently named for us of late. I quote from that rare book, the "Descriptive Sketches" of 1793; and as the lines are not included in any edition of his poems, they are unfamiliar to most readers. But two copies of this book, so far as I know, exist in this country. One of them, which belonged to the late Prof. Henry Reed, Wordsworth's American editor, is full of corrections in Wordsworth's own handwriting; and it is by the courtesy of its present owner that I am enabled to give here the early text with these corrections, never before printed. The young Wordsworth takes leave of Switzerland, at the conclusion of his pedestrian tour, with this glowing apostrophe:
ye the Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade your Rest near their little plots of oaten glade, Dark Those stedfast eyes, that beating breasts inspire, To throw the "sultry rays" of young Desire; soft =Those= lips whose ^ tides of fragrance come and go Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow; Ye warm Those shadowy breasts In love's soft light array'd And rising by the moon of passion sway'd.[G]
[Footnote G: I venture to note, in passing, a small class of corrections in which the poet has cleared his text from certain innocencies of expression that were liable to be misread by persons on the alert for double meanings. The following are among the Wordsworthian simplicities that have been amended in the later editions; the reference is made to the octavos of 1815, which may be compared with any of the editions since 1836:
Vol. I., page 111, "The Brothers," passage beginning, "James, tired perhaps."
Vol. I., page 210, "Michael," passage beginning, "Old Michael, while he was a babe in arms."
Vol. I., page 223, "Laodamia," stanza beginning, "Be taught, O faithful Consort."]
Wordsworth thus dropped, for one reason or another, many passages from his poems. But did he abandon entire poems? That did not often happen. He strove patiently to perfect the form of his thought; but he was unwilling to let the substance of it go. In the seven volumes of his poetry, as they now stand, but two poems are lacking, to the best of my knowledge, of all that he ever published. One of these, an unimportant piece beginning, "The confidence of youth our only art," was printed with the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent" (1822), and no longer appears in the collected editions. The other missing poem, "Andrew Jones," was abandoned for reasons, as I think, of considerable critical interest. In the "Lyrical Ballads" it began thus: