Ed.]

[Footnote n:  The notes to this edition are explanatory rather than critical; but as this image has been objected to—­as inaccurate, and out of all analogy with Wordsworth’s use and wont—­it may be mentioned that the noise of the breaking up of the ice, after a severe winter in these lakes, when it cracks and splits in all directions, is exactly as here described.  It is not of course, in any sense peculiar to the English lakes; but there are probably few districts where the peculiar noise referred to can be heard so easily or frequently.  Compare Coleridge’s account of the Lake of Ratzeburg in winter, in ‘The Friend’, vol. ii. p. 323 (edition of 1818), and his reference to “the thunders and ‘howlings’ of the breaking ice.”—­Ed.]

[Footnote o:  I here insert a very remarkable MS. variation of the text, or rather (I think) one of these experiments in dealing with his theme, which were common with Wordsworth.  I found it in a copy of the Poems belonging to the poet’s son: 

  I tread the mazes of this argument, and paint
  How nature by collateral interest
  And by extrinsic passion peopled first
  My mind with beauteous objects:  may I well
  Forget what might demand a loftier song,
  For oft the Eternal Spirit, He that has
  His Life in unimaginable things,
  And he who painting what He is in all
  The visible imagery of all the World
  Is yet apparent chiefly as the Soul
  Of our first sympathies—­O bounteous power
  In Childhood, in rememberable days
  How often did thy love renew for me
  Those naked feelings which, when thou would’st form
  A living thing, thou sendest like a breeze
  Into its infant being!  Soul of things
  How often did thy love renew for me
  Those hallowed and pure motions of the sense
  Which seem in their simplicity to own
  An intellectual charm:  That calm delight
  Which, if I err not, surely must belong
  To those first-born affinities which fit
  Our new existence to existing things,
  And, in our dawn of being, constitute
  The bond of union betwixt life and joy. 
  Yes, I remember, when the changeful youth
  And twice five seasons on my mind had stamped
  The faces of the moving year, even then
  A child, I held unconscious intercourse
  With the eternal beauty, drinking in
  A pure organic pleasure from the lines
  Of curling mist, or from the smooth expanse
  Of waters coloured by the clouds of Heaven.

Ed.]

[Footnote p:  Snowdrops still grow abundantly in many an orchard and meadow by the road which skirts the western side of Esthwaite Lake.—­Ed.]

[Footnote q:  Compare the ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality’, stanza ix.—­Ed.]

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BOOK SECOND

SCHOOL-TIME—­continued ...