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“I spent a week there (the Swan Inn) early in the fifties, and well remember the sign over the door distinguishable from afar:  the inn, little more than a cottage (the only one), with clean well-sanded floor, and rush-bottomed chairs:  the landlady, good old soul, one day afraid of burdening me with some old coppers, insisted on retaining them till I should return from an uphill walk, when they were duly tendered to me.  Here I learnt many particulars of Hartley Coleridge, dead shortly before, who had been a great favourite with the host and hostess.  The grave of Wordsworth was at that time barely grassed over.”—­Ed.]

[Footnote D:  See Wordsworth’s note [Note I to this poem, below], p. 109.—­Ed.]

[Footnote E:  A mountain of Grasmere, the broken summit of which presents two figures, full as distinctly shaped as that of the famous cobler, near Arracher, in Scotland.—­W.  W. 1819.]

[Footnote F:  A term well known in the North of England, as applied to rural Festivals, where young persons meet in the evening for the purpose of dancing.—­W.  W. 1819.]

[Footnote G:  At the close of each strathspey, or jig, a particular note from the fiddle summons the Rustic to the agreeable duty of saluting his Partner.—­W.  W. 1819.]

[Footnote H:  Compare in ‘Tristram Shandy’: 

  “And this, said he, is the town of Namur, and this is the citadel:  and
  there lay the French, and here lay his honour and myself.”—­Ed.]

[Footnote J:  See Wordsworth’s note [Note III to this poem, below], p. 109.—­Ed.]

[Footnote K:  The crag of the ewe lamb.—­W.  W. 1820.]

[Footnote L:  Compare Tennyson’s “Farewell, we lose ourselves in light.”—­Ed.]

[Footnote M:  Compare Wordsworth’s lines, beginning, “She was a Phantom of delight,” p. i, and Hamlet, act II. sc. ii. l. 124.—­Ed.]

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SUB-FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Sub-Footnote a:  See Wordsworth’s note [Note II to the poem, below], p. 109.—­Ed.]

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NOTES ON THE TEXT

(Added in the edition of 1836)

I

Several years after the event that forms the subject of the foregoing poem, in company with my friend, the late Mr. Coleridge, I happened to fall in with the person to whom the name of Benjamin is given.  Upon our expressing regret that we had not, for a long time, seen upon the road either him or his waggon, he said:—­“They could not do without me; and as to the man who was put in my place, no good could come out of him; he was a man of no ideas.”

The fact of my discarded hero’s getting the horses out of a great difficulty with a word, as related in the poem, was told me by an eye-witness.