¹ I suppose the sod-seat of boards or rocks packed with dirt beside the cottage door was common in both the West Country and the Lakes; but I noticed none during brief stays during the summer of 1939 in the Quantocks and Lakes. None of the travel books, guides, and regional manners and customs volumes which I have searched through, mention it, not even Wordsworth in his Guide to the Lakes (Ernest de Selincourt, ed., London, 1936). A French “sopha of sods” (the term used by both Coleridge and Sterne) may be seen in Maurice Leloir's illustration for the chapter “The Grace” in A Sentimental Journey.

² In chronological order these early references are: (1) 1791-92, Wordsworth, Descriptive Sketches, 19 (p. 11); (2) 1795, Wordsworth, “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree,” 8-12 (pp. 22-23); (3) May, 1795, Coleridge, “Lines Composed While Climbing the Left Ascent of Brockley Coomb, Somersetshire,” 7-11 (p. 94); (4) 1796, Coleridge, “To a Young Friend, on his Proposing to Domesticate with the Author,” 23-24 (p. 156); (5) Ibid., 54-55 (p. 157); (6) 1797, Coleridge, “The Ancient Mariner,” 519-522 (p. 206). References to both Wordsworth and Coleridge are to the Oxford one-volume editions.

³ See footnote 2, number (6).

⁴ Ernest de Selincourt, ed., “Coleridge's Dejection: an Ode,” Essays and Studies, xxii (Oxford, 1937), p. 8, line 86.

⁵ Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Wm. Knight (London, 1925), 1-vol. edition, p. 46. On the ninth Dorothy had “walked with Coleridge in the Windy Brow woods.” On the eleventh, “walked to Windy Brow” (p. 45). Windy Brow, on the northern bank of the Greta, under Latrigg, had been visited by Dorothy and William in 1794, when they stayed with Wiliam Calvert.

⁶ Poems, p. 382. In the notes E. H. Coleridge has called attention to the “dog-Latin.”

⁷ Grasmere Journal, p. 47. The passage is quoted here as corrected by Ernest de Selincourt, Dorothy Wordsworth, A Biography (Oxford, 1933), p. 125.

⁸ Grasmere Journal, Oct. 22, p. 55; “Poems on the Naming of Places,” iii, 1-3 (p. 148). Wordsworth recanted these lines many years later: “It is not accurate,” he said, “that the eminence could be seen from our orchard-seat.” I. Fenwick notes, quoted by William Knight, The English Lake District as Interpreted in the Poems of Wordsworth (Edinburgh, 1878), p. 61.

⁹ Grasmere Journal, Dec. 22, 1801, p. 73. This was the day on which Wordsworth again began work on “The Pedlar.”

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 119.

¹¹ The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth (1787-1805), ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford, 1935), p. 428.

¹² Ibid., p. 433.

¹³ Ibid., p. 495. On June 3, 1805, William writes to Sir George Beaumont: “I write to you from the moss-hut at the top of my orchard, the sun just sinking behind the hills in front of the entrance, and his light falling upon the green moss of the side opposite me.” Ibid., pp. 495-496. Professor de Selincourt has commented on the connection between the last half of the Intimations ode and the Ode to Duty in his introduction to The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind (London, 1932 impression), p. lxi.

¹⁴ Grasmere Journal, p. 63.

¹⁵ Poems, p. 361, lines 19-20.

¹⁶ Grasmere Journal, p. 52. Some of these verses turn up in the fourth book of The Excursion.

¹⁷ Grasmere Journal, p. 136.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 103.

¹⁹ Edward Dowden, ed., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (London, 1893), vii, 332.

²⁰ William Wordsworth, The Excursion, Being a Portion of The Recluse, a Poem (London, 1814), 1st edition, p. 71. There are a few unimportant changes in the later text, The Excursion, ii, 410-422 (Poems, p. 777). William Knight, op. cit., p. 143, finds the place for this seat on the descent to Blea Tarn from the top of Lingmoor, about 3½ miles from Grasmere. The italics are mine.

²¹ Ernest de Selincourt, ed., “Coleridge's Dejection: an Ode,” Essays and Studies, xxii (Oxford, 1937), 8, lines 80-86. The italics are mine.

²² “… a young man, the creature of another's predetermination, sheltered and weather-fended from all the elements of experience… .” “Pitt and Buonaparte,” reprinted in Essays on His Own Times (1850), ii, 322; also reprinted by William Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819), p. 396; The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. by P. P. Howe (London, 1932), vii, 328. Wordsworth uses the compound again in The Excursion, vii, 178 (Poems, p. 860); 1st edition, p. 112.

²³ As in J. D. Campbell's Life, affixed to his edition of The Poetical Works (London, 1898), p. lii; E. K. Chambers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Oxford, 1938), p. 126.

²⁴ The following lines come immediately after the passage quoted above from The Excursion (1st edition, p. 71):

(Poems, p. 778, lines 423-428.)

²⁵ Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Note-Books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Boston, 1895), pp. 25, 50. Mr. Coleridge, p. 50, says flatly, “The ‘Sopha of Sods’ was on Latrigg”; and it is possible he had information which proved this—yet it is not unlikely that he was merely linking the “Sopha” with the Windy Brow seat and that S. T. Coleridge sometimes used “sopha” for either the Windy Brow Seat or Sara's. J. L. Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (Boston, 1930, revised edition), pp. 468-469, shows connections with Wordsworth's long letter to John Wilson (“Christopher North”) in 1802.

²⁶ Poems, p. 381.

²⁷ de Selincourt, ed., Dejection: an Ode, p. 8, lines 87-91.

²⁸ Poems, p. 382, lines 16-19. Of course it is easy to push such common parallels too far.

²⁹ E. H. Coleridge, Poems, p. 382, note 1, compares lines 8-12,

to the notebook entry, Anima Poetae, pl 14, “The spring with the little tiny cone of loose sand ever rising and sinking to the bottom, but its surface without a wrinkle.” Nearby entries are for September, 1801.

³⁰ A House of Letters, ed., Ernest Betham (London, n. d., “a new edition,” published by Jarrois), p. 108. There are other elements of dream imagery and symbolism in this important passage, which I shall consider in a later paper. It is quite unnecessary to establish the fact that Coleridge used both deliberate and “unconscious” symbolism. He is plain enough himself about this. Two beautiful passages on this topic are given by James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1838), p. 311; pp. 309-310, reprinted in Biographia Epistolaris, ed. A. Turnbull (London, 1911), ii, 153-154.

³¹ Thomas M. Raysor, “Coleridge and ‘Asra,‘” Studies in Philology, xxvi (1929), 311.

³² Ibid., p. 321.

³³ “The Historie and Gests of Maxilian,” Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, xi (Jan. 1822), 12a. Italics in prose are mine. The “Historie” was written in order to fulfil (in part) an obligation due to advances from Blackwood. Ode to Dejection, Poems, p. 364, lines 37-38. The saw not felt lines quoted, with the change from the first to the third person, seem to be closely related to the first book of The Excursion; see especially, Wordsworth, Poems, p. 759, The Excursion, i, 226, 232. It seems likely that Coleridge heard both the first part of The Excursion (i.e., “The Pedlar”) and of the Intimations ode read aloud before he was moved to write his ode. Undoubtedly, however, he wove into the ode certain fragments previously written.

³⁴ Coleridge, Poems, p. 389, lines 9-12.

³⁵ Letters, i, 437 (Sept. 10, 1803), and passim.