Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/374

 370 Whitford Others of Anstey's quatrains remotely resemble quatrains of Wordsworth. For instance, compare these two specimens: 'To-night will be a stormy night You to the town must go; And take a lantern, Child, to light Your mother through the snow.' Mean time her eager anxious way From morning's dawning light, Poor Lucy held, till lengthening shades Announc'd th'approaching night. The resemblance between the two poems is clear enough to make it seem entirely possible that, if Wordworth did not borrow the name of Lucy from Christopher Anstey, at least both poets derived it from a common source. Though in their inner meaning the "Lucy poems" 3 are quite unlike either of the ballads which we have been discussing, the reader is bound to connect by a natural association of ideas the Lucy who "dwelt on a wide moor," "not far from Halifax in Yorkshire," and the other who dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove (also in Yorkshire). Nor is it difficult to believe that both these heroines are in some wise related to Anstey's Lucy, especially as there is a distinct similarity of thought between one stanza of The Farmer's Daughter and two famous lines of She dwelt among the untrodden ways. The older poet character- ized his subject thus: 8 The five related poems written in Germany in 1799 were: Strange fits of passion have I known; She dwelt among the untrodden ways; I travelled among unknown men; Three years she grew in sun and shower; and A slumber did my my spirit seal. This paper leaves out of account all other supposed "Lucy poems." Professor Harper would add to the canon: Louisa, after accompanying her on a mountain excursion; To a young lady, who had been reproached for taking long walks in the country; and, a poem in which the name of Lucy appears, Among all lovely things my love had been. Of the three the first and second were probably written in 1801 and the third surely in April of 1802. Professor Herford, in The Age of Wordsworth, suggests that the sonnet Surprised by Joy, which according to the generally accepted dating was "composed later than June, 1812," and "published 1815," is yet another song of mourning for Lucy.