thee
  Harsh judgments, if the song be loth to quit 630
  Those recollected hours that have the charm
  Of visionary things, those lovely forms
  And sweet sensations that throw back our life,
  And almost make remotest infancy
  A visible scene, on which the sun is shining? [q] 635

    One end at least hath been attained; my mind
  Hath been revived, and if this genial mood
  Desert me not, forthwith shall be brought down
  Through later years the story of my life. 
  The road lies plain before me;—­’tis a theme 640
  Single and of determined bounds; and hence
  I choose it rather at this time, than work
  Of ampler or more varied argument,
  Where I might be discomfited and lost: 
  And certain hopes are with me, that to thee 645
  This labour will be welcome, honoured Friend!

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES TO BOOK THE FIRST

[Footnote A:  On the authority of the poet’s nephew, and others, the “city” here referred to has invariably been supposed to be Goslar, where he spent the winter of 1799.  Goslar, however, is as unlike a “vast city” as it is possible to conceive.  Wordsworth could have walked from end to end of it in ten minutes.

One would think he was rather referring to London, but there is no evidence to show that he visited the metropolis in the spring of 1799.  The lines which follow about “the open fields” (l. 50) are certainly more appropriate to a journey from London to Sockburn, than from Goslar to Gottingen; and what follows, the “green shady place” of l. 62, the “known Vale” and the “cottage” of ll. 72 and 74, certainly refer to English soil.—­Ed.]

[Footnote B:  Compare ‘Paradise Lost’, xii. l. 646.

  ‘The world was all before them, where to choose.’

Ed.]

[Footnote C:  Compare ‘Lines composed above Tintern Abbey’, II. 52-5 (vol. ii. p. 53.)—­Ed.]

[Footnote D:  S. T. Coleridge.—­Ed.]

[Footnote E:  At Sockburn-on-Tees, county Durham, seven miles south-east of Darlington.—­Ed.]

[Footnote F:  Grasmere.—­Ed.]

[Footnote G:  Dove Cottage at Town-end.—­Ed.]

[Footnote H:  This quotation I am unable to trace.—­Ed.]

[Footnote I:  Wordsworth spent most of the year 1799 (from March to December) at Sockburn with the Hutchinsons.  With Coleridge and his brother John he went to Windermere, Rydal, Grasmere, etc., in the autumn, returning afterwards to Sockburn.  He left it again, with his sister, on Dec. 19, to settle at Grasmere, and they reached Dove Cottage on Dec. 21, 1799.—­Ed.]

[Footnote K:  See Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal, passim.—­Ed.]

[Footnote L:  Compare the 2nd and 3rd of the ’Stanzas written in my pocket-copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence’, vol. ii. p. 306, and the note appended to that poem.—­Ed.]