and rarer
editions--no method of arrangement can be so good as the chronological
one. Its importance will be obvious after several volumes are published,
when the point referred to above--viz. the evolution of the poet's
genius--will be shown by the very sequence of the subjects chosen, and
their method of treatment from year to year.

The date of the composition of Wordsworth's Poems cannot always be
ascertained with accuracy: and to get at the chronological order, it is
not sufficient to take up his earlier volumes, and thereafter to note
the additions made in subsequent ones. We now know (approximately) when
each poem was first published; although, in some instances, they
appeared in newspapers and magazines, and in many cases publication was
long after the date of composition. For example, 'Guilt and Sorrow; or,
Incidents upon Salisbury Plain'--written in the years 1791-94--was not
published 'in extenso' till 1842. The tragedy of 'The Borderers',
composed in 1795-96, was also first published in 1842. 'The
Prelude'--"commenced in the beginning of the year 1799, and completed in
the summer of 1805"--was published posthumously in 1850: and some
unpublished poems--both "of early and late years"--were first issued in
1886. A poem was frequently kept back, from some doubt as to its worth,
or from a wish to alter and amend it. Of the five or six hundred sonnets
that he wrote, Wordsworth said "Most of them were frequently re-touched;
and, not a few, laboriously." Some poems were almost entirely recast;
and occasionally fugitive verses were withheld from publication for a
time, because it was hoped that they would subsequently form part of a
larger whole.

In the case of many of the poems, we are left to conjecture the date of
composition, although we are seldom without some clue to it. The Fenwick
Notes are a great assistance in determining the chronology. These
notes--which will be afterwards more fully referred to--were dictated by
Wordsworth to Miss Fenwick in the year 1843; but, at that time, his
memory could not be absolutely trusted as to dates; and in some
instances we know it to have been at fault. For example, he said of 'The
Old Cumberland Beggar' that it was "written at Racedown and Alfoxden in
my twenty-third year." Now, he went to Racedown in the autumn of 1795,
when he was twenty-five years old; and to Alfoxden, in the autumn of
1797, when twenty-seven. Again, the poem 'Rural Architecture' is put
down in the