Page:Poems and extracts - Wordsworth.djvu/127

 69 Dyer's 'Ruins of Rome* in ed. 1807 of Poems. W.'s extract begins at line 16 of the Ruins, which runs thus:

but the irrelevant and conventional (not to say Ossianic) bit about the heroes and their urns is struck out.

1. 7 aloft,—upon 1. 14 as th' immense 1. 15 lerne's

70 1. 24 orison 1. 25 Time,—disparting 1. 29 they with

Between 11. 31 and 32 W. omits 284 lines, 1. 332 of Ruins beginning: Time ordains (W. inserts So). Miss Hutchinson sometimes makes a — so short that we have had to print it as a hyphen, thus obscuring the sense, as in 1. 25.

71 1. 42 th' 1. 62 all-devouring 1. 63 sitting on 1. 55 thy diapason, Melancholy!

72 Waller's Poems (Muses' Library ed., p. 128). There is a curious change (it can hardly be intentional) in 1. 7, where Waller reads:

73 Waller's Poems (Muses' Library ed., p. 67 ; Anderson, V. 479). The change in 11. 11-12 is very remarkable. Waller reads: If Wordsworth made the alteration (and, so far as we can judge, he did), he has greatly strengthened the comparison, while eliminating warms, to which he probably took objection.

1. 17 hand that doth

74 The curious will find a good sketch of Lætitia Pilkington's life in the ''Dict. Nat. Biog.''

76 Thomas Warton the elder (1688?-1745) was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1718 to 1728, but his chief service to English literature was his being the father of Joseph and Thomas Warton. His Poems on Several Occasions were published in 1748, and 'at the end of the volume are two elegies on the author—one by his daughter Jane, and the other by Joseph Warton, the editor' (Dict. Nat, Biog.). Rh