E TEXT

[Variant 1:

1815.

... dancing ... 1807.]

[Variant 2:

1815.

Along the Lake, beneath the trees,
Ten thousand dancing in the breeze. 1807]

[Variant 3: This stanza was added in the edition of 1815.]

[Variant 4:

1807

... be but gay, 1836.

The 1840 edition returns to the text of 1807.]

[Variant 5:

1815.

... laughing ... 1807.]

The following is from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal, under date,
Thursday, April 15, 1802:

"When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park, we saw a few
daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the sea had floated
the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as
we went along there were more, and yet more; and, at last, under the
boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along
the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw
daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones, about and
above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow
for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed
as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the
lake. They looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing. This wind blew
directly over the lake to them. There was here and there a little
knot, and a few stragglers higher up; but they were so few as not to
disturb the simplicity, unity, and life of that one busy highway. We
rested again and again. The bays were stormy, and we heard the waves
at different distances, and in the middle of the water, like the
sea...."

In the edition of 1815 there is a footnote to the lines

'They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude'

to the following effect:

"The subject of these Stanzas is rather an elementary feeling and
simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular spectrum)
upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it. The one which
follows [A] is strictly a Reverie; and neither that, nor the next
after it in succession, 'Power of Music', would have been placed here
except for the reason given in the foregoing note."

The being "placed here" refers to its being included among the "Poems of
the Imagination." The "foregoing note" is the note appended to 'The Horn
of Egremont Castle'; and the "reason given" in it is "to avoid a
needless multiplication of the Classes" into w