Since receiving these letters I have ascertained that Wordsworth had in his library at Rydal Mount-whether he had it at Allan Bank I cannot say a copy of one of the English editions of Carver's Travels. Compare Wanderings in South America, &c., by Charles Waterton— a work which was also in Wordsworth's library at Rydal. I quote from a recent edition (1879). See pp. 99, 111, 199, and 488: . "When in thy hammock, should the thought of thy little crosses and disappointments, in thy ups and downs through life, break in upon thee, and throw thee into a pensive mood, the owl will bear thee company. She will tell thee that hard has been her fate too; and at intervals Whip-poor-will' and 'Willy-come-go' will take up the tale of sorrow. Ovid has told thee how the owl once boasted the human form, and lost it for a very small offence; and were the poet alive now, he would inform thee, that 'Whip-poor-will' and' Willy-come-go' are the shades of these poor African and Indian slaves, who died worn out and broken hearted. They wail and cry, ' Whip-poor-will' and 'Willycome-go' all night long; and often, when the moon shines, you see them sitting on the green turf, near the houses of those whose ancestors tore them from the bosom of their helpless families, which all probably perished through grief and want, after their support was gone." (P. 99.) "The Caprimulgus wheels in busy flight around the canoe, while 'Whip-poor-will' sits on the broken stump near the water's edge, complaining as the shades of night set in." (P. 111.) See, in addition, Note L in this Appendix. NOTE F. (See p. 175.) A translation of the passage from Pausanias is quoted in the text. I append extracts from some letters I have received on the subject. The first are from Mr Heard, Fettes College, Edinburgh. Oct. 5th. "I cannot find a reference to Cephisus; but I send you a passage in point from Homer, Iliad 23, 140. I rather suspect Wordsworth had this passage in mind, for no commentator I have quotes a parallel; in which case he has either forgotten Spercheius as the river, or substituted, on purpose, the better known Attic river. Achilles offers to the dead Patroclus the locks which his father had vowed to Spercheius, if ever he returned to his native land ἔνθ' αυτ ̓ ἀλλ ̓ ἐνόησε ποδάρκης διος Αχιλλεύς· ὀχθήσας δ' ἄρα εἶπεν ἰδὼν ἐπὶ οίνοπα πόντον. Σπερχει, άλλως σοίγε πατὴρ ἠρήσατο Πηλεύς "Oct. 13th. "I have discovered the reference to the Cephisus. It is from Pausanias 1, 37, 3. I transcribe the passage: you will notice the reference to the Spercheius of the Iliad. 66 “ πρὶν δὲ διαβῆναι τὸν Κηφισόν, Θεοδώρου μνῆμά ἐστι τραγωδιάν ὑποκριναμένου τῶν καθ ̓ αὑτὸν ἄριστα. ̓Αγάλματα δὲ ἐπὶ τῷ ποταμῷ Μνησιμάχης, τὸ δὲ ἕτερον ἀνάθημα κειρομένου οἱ τὴν κόμην τοῦ παιδὸς ἐπὶ τῷ Κηφισῷ. Καθεστάναι δὲ ἐκ παλαιον καὶ τοῖς πᾶσι τοῦτο "Ελλησι τῇ Ομήρου τις ἄν τεκμαί ροιτο ποιήσει, ὃς τὸν Πηλέα εὐξασθαί φησι τῷ Σπερχειῷ κερεῖν ἀνασωθέντος ἐκ Τροίας ̓Αχιλλέως τὴν κόμην. "There can be little doubt that Wordsworth had this passage in mind. The Cephisus is the Attic one; this is a statue, which Pausanias saw on the banks of the river, of the son of Mnesimache cutting his locks over the stream." Professor Campbell writes :-"The Homeric passage is Iliad 23, 140151, where Achilles cuts off for Patroclus the lock of hair, which his father Peleus had vowed to the river Spercheius in case of his son's safe return. This is referred to by Plato,-Rep. 3, 391 B,-who regards it as an act of impiety to have given that, which was sacred to the river, to a dead body. "Unless the passage in Pausanias is singularly apposite, I should think that this passage must have been in Wordsworth's mind, and that by a perfectly legitimate use of poetic freedom, in speaking of the later Greek civilisation, he had put the Attic in place of the Pthiotic river." Since receiving Mr Heard's letter, I have found that Wordsworth possessed a copy of Thomas Taylor's translation of Pausanias' "Description of Greece," published in 1794, a copy of that work having been sold at the Rydal Mount sale in 1859. Bishop Wordsworth of St Andrews has also directed my attention to the following note to Pope's translation of the Iliad, a copy of which his uncle possessed. Book xxiii. 175. "It was the custom of the ancients not only to offer their own hair, but likewise to consecrate that of their children to the river-gods of their country. This is what Pausanias shews in his Attics; Before you pass the Cephisa, says he, you find the tomb of Theodorus, who was he most excellent actor of the time for tragedy; and, on the banks you see two statues, one of Mnesimachus, and the other of his son, who cut off his hair in honour of the rivers; for that this was in all ages the custom of the Greeks, may be inferred from Homer's poetry, where Peleus promises by a solemn vow to consecrate to the river Sperchius the hair of his son, if he returns safe from the Trojan war. This custom was likewise in Egypt, where Philostratus tells us that Memnon consecrated his hair to the Nile. This practice of Achilles was imitated by Alexander at the funeral of Hephaestius. Spondanus." It is very likely that Wordsworth had read this note to the annotated edition (1763) of Pope's Homer; but it is also probable that he was familiar with the passage in Pausanias. NOTE G. (See p. 312.) Many additional particulars regarding John Gough * may be found in Cornelius Nicholson's Annals of Kendal, pp. 355-368 (Whitaker and Coy., 1861). He was born in 1757 and died in 1825. "Before the completion of his third year he was attacked with small-pox, which deprived him of his sight. The whole globe of his left eye was destroyed: the damage done to the other was not so extensive: for, though the greater part of the corner was rendered opaque, there was a minute pellucid speck to the right of the pupil which permitted a ray of light to fall upon the verge of the retina, and thus he was enabled to distinguish between day and night but he had no perception of the form or colour of objects around him; so that, for all useful purposes, vision was completely lost." But his marvellous sense of touch, as described by Wordsworth, was in no degree exaggerated. In his eighth summer, he began the study of botany; and pursued it systematically in his thirteenth year. "His method of examining plants must be briefly told. Systems of classification were but little valued, except so far as they aided him in recognising individual form. The plant to be examined was held by the root or base in one hand, while the fingers of the other travelled slowly upwards over the stem, branches, and leaves, till they reached the flower. If the species had been already met with, this procedure was sufficient for its recognition; if it proved to be a novelty, its class was first determined by the insertion of the tip of his tongue within the flower: thus he discerned the number and arrangement of the stamens and pistils. When the flower was small he requested his reader to ascertain these points with a lens. The class and order being determined, the genus was next worked out, word by word of the description, so far at least as the state of the specimen would allow. But his perceptive power over form was most conspicuous in the analysis of species. It was truly wonderful to witness the rapidity with which his fingers ran among the leaves, taking cognisance of their divisions, shape, and secretions, and of the presence or absence of hairs. The finest down was detected by a stem or leaf being drawn gently * The mention of John Gough's name suggests the Charles Gough commemorated in the Poem Fidelity (Vol. III. pp. 35-38). And I may here add a fact, which has only recently come to my knowledge, that this Charles Gough was killed on the Keppelcove side of Swirrell Edge, and not at Red Tarn, as described in the poem. across the border of his lower lip; so fine indeed that a young eye often required a lens to verify the truth of the perception. Another peculiarity is worthy of notice. Repeated perusal of descriptions had enabled him to prefigure in his mind's eye, the form without the presence of specimens; so that, when a species for the first time came within his touch, he at once named it from memory. . . It was probably, on one of these occasions, that Mr Wordsworth, while describing the little cushion-like plant, with white roots and purple flowers, growing near Grisdale Tarn, caught the first glimpse of that conception which were afterwards expanded into the beautiful picture given of Mr Gough in The Excursion." Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Essay on The Soul and its Organs of Sense, refers to him as "not only an excellent mathematician, but an infallible botanist and zoologist. He has frequently, at first feel, corrected the mistakes of the most experienced sportsmen, with regard to the birds or vermin which they had killed, when it chanced to be a variety or rare species, so completely resembling the common one, that it required great steadiness of observation to detect the difference, even after it had been pointed out." "Good heavens ! " added Coleridge, "why his face sees all over!" Gough died in the 69th year of his age; and he was buried, not as Wordsworth puts it in The Excursion, at Grasmere, but in the Churchyard of Kendal. What is more remarkable is that he lived for ten years after The Excursion was printed; and Wordsworth must have written the passage in the Seventh Book referring to Gough in anticipation of his death, probably 13 years before he died. Mr John Watson of Kendal tells me that he has had lately put into his hands a MS. autobiography of Gough. Mr Watson has himself written an interesting sketch of the blind botanist. NOTE H. Perhaps the most interesting contemporary criticism of Wordsworth was that by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb. Lamb's critical estimates are contained in the letters he wrote to Wordsworth, on receiving presentation copies of his poems as they appeared. These are preserved in the two volumes of his Letters, edited by Thomas Noon Talfourd in 1836, and in the Final Memorials which followed in 1848. It was my original intention to insert these remarks at the close of each poem to which they refer; but it was found that the drift of many of the letters, and the scope of the whole criticism, would in some instances be entirely lost, if the extract was limited to the remark made on a single poem; and, as it would have been quite inadmissible to repeat the extracts in the notes appended to several poems, I decided to print the whole of these criticisms of Lamb's together in an appendix to one of the volumes. At page 207 of Vol. IV., reference is made to Lamb's remarks on The Force of Prayer, and it was at first intended that these should appear in the Appendix to that volume. As Lamb refers, however, at some length to The Excursion, the most appropriate place, in which to reproduce his criticism as a whole, is the Appendix to Vol V.; and it is accordingly printed here, with the exception of the note to The Waggoner, which appeared in Vol. III. (Appendix I.), and that in The White Doe of Rylstone, which was printed in Vol. IV. The following was written to Wordsworth in the year 1804, and refers to the publication of the third edition of Lyrical Ballads in that year. "I had already borrowed your second volume. What please me most are, 'The Song of Lucy;' Simon's sickly daughter, in 'The Sexton,' made me cry. Next to these are the description of the continuous echoes in the story of 'Joanna's Laugh,' where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that fine Shakspearian character of the 'happy man,' in the 'Brothers,' -'that creeps about the fields, Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek or solitary smiles Write Fool upon his forehead!' "I will mention one more the delicate and curious feeling in the wish of the Cumberland Beggar,' that he may have about him the melody of birds, although he hear them not. Here the mind knowingly passes a fiction upon herself, first substituting her own feelings for the Beggar's, and in the same breath detecting the fallacy, will not part with the wish. The 'Poet's Epitaph' is disfigured, to my taste, by the common satire upon parsons and lawyers in the beginning, and the coarse epithet of 'pinpoint' in the sixth stanza." "DEAR WORDSWORTH,-Thanks for the books you have given me. I have not bound the poems yet. I wait till people have done borrowing them. I think I shall get a chain, and chain them to my shelves, more Bodleiano, and people may come and read them at chain's length. For of those who borrow, some read slow; some mean to read, but don't read; and some neither read nor mean to read, but borrow to leave you an opinion of their sagacity. C. LAMB." "DEAR WORDSWORTH,-You have made me very proud with your successive book presents. I have been carefully through the two volumes, to see that nothing was omitted which used to be there. I think I miss nothing but 'a character in the antithetic manner,' which I do not know why you left out, the moral to the boys building the giant, the omission whereof leaves it, in my mind, less complete,—and one admirable line gone (or something come instead of it), 'the stone-chat and |