pro THE EDITOR. Or THE "SPECTATOR."] Tollemache's reminiscence as to
the occasion of this poem raises some interesting questions for the Words- worth student. The poet himself gives 1834 as the date of composition, and in the "Fenwick note says that it was " extempore on observing this image on the lawn of Rydal Mount," and was first written down in the album of Rotha Quillinan. (Had this memorandum escaped the notice of the poet's grandson to whom Mr. Tollemache refers ?) But the present writer has good, though second-hand, authority for saying that there is a lady now living (or who was living last December), aged eighty-four or eighty-five, who remembers the poet reciting the verse to her when, as a child, she had taken a book up to him at Rydal Mount ; and he afterwards wrote it down for her in an album. The lady in question was not Rothe Quillinan. But is she the same as Mr. Tolle- mache's informant ? If the latter was " aged " "some thirty years ago," probably not. Taking these notes of time strictly, Mr. Tollemache's lady must have been at least twenty four in 1834, while mine would have been about nine years old. If, then, we are to accept the poet's own reminiscence as exact, and as excluding the existence of the lines in any shape before 1834, Mr. Tollemache's recollection would seem to err in the length of time assigned, for his data involve, not the application of lines previously composed to a new occasion, but the composition of them some years before the occasion to which the poet himself attributes them. The recital of the stanza to two children exclusive of Rotha Quillinan con- stitutes, of course, no difficulty, for the lines contain just the sort of moral lesson which the poet would have delighted to extend to all his youthful acquaintance. But I feel it would be attributing too great inaccuracy to Wordsworth's memory if we impugn the date "1834" which was affixed to the poem at least as early as ed. 1836-37.-1 am, Sir, &c.,
STEPHEN LIBERTY.
St. Deinies Library, Hawarden.
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