Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear,
  Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear.

Ed.]

* * * * *

[Variant 1: 

1827.

  Is up, and cropping yet ... 1807.]

[Variant 2: 

1838.

  ... seems ... 1807.]

* * * * *

AN EVENING WALK

ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG LADY

Composed 1787-9. [A]—­Published 1793

[The young Lady to whom this was addressed was my Sister.  It was composed at School, and during my first two College vacations.  There is not an image in it which I have not observed; and, now in my seventy-third year, I recollect the time and place, when most of them were noticed.  I will confine myself to one instance: 

    Waving his hat, the shepherd, from the vale,
    Directs his winding dog the cliffs to scale,—­
    The dog, loud barking, ’mid the glittering rocks,
    Hunts, where his master points, the intercepted flocks.

  I was an eye-witness of this for the first time while crossing the
  Pass of Dunmail Raise.  Upon second thought, I will mention another
  image: 

    And, fronting the bright west, yon oak entwines
    Its darkening boughs and leaves, in stronger lines.

This is feebly and imperfectly expressed, but I recollect distinctly the very spot where this first struck me.  It was on the way between Hawkshead and Ambleside, and gave me extreme pleasure.  The moment was important in my poetical history; for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite variety of natural appearances which had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or country, so far as I was acquainted with them; and I made a resolution to supply in some degree the deficiency.  I could not have been at that time above fourteen years of age.  The description of the swans, that follows, was taken from the daily opportunities I had of observing their habits, not as confined to the gentleman’s park, but in a state of nature.  There were two pairs of them that divided the lake of Esthwaite, and its in-and-out flowing streams, between them, never trespassing a single yard upon each other’s separate domain.  They were of the old magnificent species, bearing in beauty and majesty about the same relation to the Thames swan which that does to the goose.  It was from the remembrance of those noble creatures, I took, thirty years after, the picture of the swan which I have discarded from the poem of ‘Dion’. [B] While I was a schoolboy, the late Mr. Curwen introduced a little fleet of these birds, but of the inferior species, to the lake of Windermere.  Their principal home was about his own island; but they sailed about into remote parts of the lake, and either from real or imagined