those who are worthiest to comprehend will he least disposed to
discuss them.

The autobiographical notes on his own works above alluded to were
dictated by the poet to his friend Miss Isabella Fenwick, at her
urgent request, in 1843, and preserve many interesting particulars
as to the circumstances under which each poem was composed. They are
to be found printed entire among Wordsworth's prose works, and I
shall therefore cite them only occasionally. Of _Lucy Gray_, for
instance, he says,--"It was founded on a circumstance told me by my
sister, of a little girl who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire,
was bewildered in a snowstorm. Her footsteps were tracked by her
parents to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige
of her, backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was
found in the canal. The way in which the incident was treated, and
the spiritualizing of the character, might furnish hints for
contrasting the imaginative influences which I have endeavoured to
throw over common life, with Crabbe's matter-of-fact style of
handling subjects of the same kind."

And of the _Lines written in Germany_, 1798-9,--

"A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed by the side
of my sister, in our lodgings, at a draper's house, in the romantic
imperial town of Goslar, on the edge of the Hartz forest. So severe
was the cold of this winter, that when we passed out of the parlour
warmed by the stove our cheeks were struck by the air as by cold iron.
I slept in a room over a passage that was not ceiled. The people of
the house used to say, rather unfeelingly, that they expected I
should be frozen to death some night; but with the protection of a