only one ... 1800.]

[Variant 3: The following stanza, in the edition of 1800, was omitted in
subsequent ones:

Poor Outcast! return--to receive thee once more
The house of thy Father will open its door,
And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown,
May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. [i]]

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT

[Footnote A: Wordsworth originally wrote "sees." S.T.C. suggested
"views."--Ed.]

* * * * *

SUB-FOOTNOTE ON VARIANT 3

[Sub-Footnote i:

"Susan stood for the representative of poor '_Rus in urbe_.' There was
quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten;
'bright volumes of vapour,' etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got
rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral
conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and
contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to
term her 'a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was
no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to
express."

Charles Lamb to Wordsworth. See 'The Letters of Charles Lamb', edited by
Alfred Ainger, vol. i., p. 287.--Ed.]

* * * * *

1798

A NIGHT PIECE

Composed 1798.--Published 1815.

[Composed on the road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, extempore. I
distinctly recollect the very moment when I was struck, as
described,--'He looks up, the clouds are split,' etc.--I. F.]

Classed by Wordsworth among his "Poems of the Imagination."--Ed.

* * * * *

--The sky is overcast
With a continuous cloud of texture close,
Heavy and wan, all whitened by the Moon,
Which through that veil is indistinctly seen,
A dull, contracted circle, yielding light 5
So feebly spread, that not a shadow falls,
Chequering the ground--from rock, plant, tree, or tower.
At length a pleasant instantaneous gleam
Startles the pensive traveller while [1] he treads
His lonesome path, with unobserving eye 10
Bent earthwards; he looks up--the clouds are split
Asunder,--and above his head he sees
The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens.
There, in a black-blue vault she sails along,
Followed by multitudes of stars, that, smal