order in which he placed it there. There is tantalising topsy-turvyism
in this, so that an editor who adopts it is almost compelled to select
Wordsworth's latest grouping, which was not always his best.

Sir William Rowan Hamilton wrote to Mr. Aubrey de Vere in 1835 that Dora
Wordsworth told him that her father "was sometimes at a loss whether to
refer her to the 'Poems of the Imagination,' or the 'Poems of the
Fancy,' for some particular passage." Aubrey de Vere himself considered
Wordsworth's arrangement as "a parade of system," and wrote of it, "I
cannot help thinking that in it, he mistakes classification for method."
[5] I confess that it is often difficult to see why some of the poems
were assigned by their author to the realm of the "Fancy," the
"Imagination," and "Sentiment and Reflection" respectively. In a note to
'The Horn of Egremont Castle' (edition 1815) Wordsworth speaks of it as
"referring to the imagination," rather than as being "produced by it";
and says that he would not have placed it amongst his "Poems of the
Imagination," "but to avoid a needless multiplication of classes"; and
in the editions of 1827 and 1832 he actually included the great 'Ode' on
Immortality among his "Epitaphs and Elegiac Poems"! As late as 27th
September 1845, he wrote to Professor Henry Reed,

"Following your example" (i. e. the example set in Reed's American
edition of the Poems), "I have greatly extended the class entitled
'Poems of the Imagination,' thinking as you must have done that, if
Imagination were predominant in the class, it was not indispensable
that it should pervade every poem which it contained. Limiting the
class as I had done before, seemed to imply, and to the uncandid or
observing did so, that the faculty, which is the 'primum mobile' in
poetry, had little to do, in the estimation of the author, with pieces
not arranged under that head. I therefore feel much obliged to you for