personally supervised; or, he must have all the changes in the
successive editions, exhibited in the form of footnotes, and appended to
the particular text that is selected and printed in the body of the
work. It is extremely difficult--in some cases quite impossible--to
obtain the early editions. The great public libraries of the country do
not possess them all.[8] It is therefore necessary to fall back upon the
latter plan, which seems the only one by which a knowledge of the
changes of the text can be made accessible, either to the general
reader, or to the special student of English Poetry.

The text which--after much consideration--I have resolved to place
throughout, in the body of the work, is Wordsworth's own final 'textus
receptus', i.e. the text of 1849-50, reproduced in the posthumous
edition of 1857; [9] and since opinion will doubtless differ as to the
wisdom of this selection, it may be desirable to state at some length
the reasons which have led me to adopt it.

There are only three possible courses open to an editor, who wishes to
give--along with the text selected--all the various readings
chronologically arranged as footnotes. Either, 1st, the earliest text
may be taken, or 2nd, the latest may be chosen, or 3rd, the text may be
selected from different editions, so as to present each poem in its best
state (according to the judgment of the editor), in whatever edition it
is found. A composite text, made up from two or more editions, would be
inadmissible.

Now, most persons who have studied the subject know that Wordsworth's
best text is to be found, in one poem in its earliest edition, in
another in its latest, and in a third in some intermediate edition. I
cannot agree either with the statement that he always altered for the