_Literary Studies_ by Walter Bagehot, Vol. ii. London: Longmans, Green and Co. _A Study of English and American Poets_ by J. Scott Clark. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. _Prophets of the Century_ edited by Arthur Rickett. London: Ward Lock and Co., Limited. _History of English Literature_ by A. S. Mackenzie. Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, Limited. _A Student's History of English Literature_ by William Edward Simonds. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. _Poems of William Wordsworth_ edited by Edward Dowden. Boston: Ginn & Company. _Home Life of Great Authors_ by Hattie Tyng Griswold. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. NOTES MICHAEL The poem was composed in 1800, and published in the second volume of the _Lyrical Ballads_ in the same year. "Written at the Town-end, Grasmere, about the same time as _The Brothers_. The Sheep-fold, on which so much of the poem turns, remains, or rather the ruins of it. The character and circumstances of Luke were taken from a family to whom had belonged, many years before, the house we lived in at Town-end, along with some fields and woodlands on the eastern shore of Grasmere. The name of the Evening Star was not in fact given to this house, but to another on the same side of the valley, more to the north." In a letter to Charles James Fox the poet says: "In the two poems, _The Brothers_ and _Michael_, I have attempted to draw a picture of the domestic affections, as I know they exist among a class of men who are now almost confined to the north of England. They are small independent _proprietors_ of land, here called 'statesmen' [i.e., estates-men], men of respectable education, who daily labor on their little properties. . . Their little tract of land serves as a kind of rallying point for their domestic feelings, as a tablet upon which they are written, which makes them objects of memory in a thousand instances, when they would otherwise be forgotten. The two poems that I have mentioned were written to show that men who do not wear fine clothes can feel deeply."