It is now sixty years since "dear brother Jim" was dismissed from his
place in these lines--dismissed, perhaps, with the less compunction
because the stanza was written by another hand--Coleridge's--as an
introduction to the rest of the poem. But I think the lines were better
as the young poets first sent them forth. "Brother Jim" had, perhaps, no
clearly demonstrable business in the poem; and yet, having been there,
we miss him now that he is gone. That homely apostrophe had in it the
primitive impulses of the Lake school feeling; the phrase refuses to be
forgotten, and seems to have a persistent life of its own. I have seen
the missing words restored, in pencil marks, to their rightful place in
the text of copies belonging to old-fashioned gentlemen who remembered
the original reading. Nor can we easily deny existence to our "dear
brother Jim"; his name still lingers in our memories, haunting about the
page from which it was excluded long ago; he lives, and deserves to
live, as the symbol of immortal fraternity.
But as I have said, Wordsworth mended his text oftener than he marred
it, and first by refining upon his descriptions of outward nature. Among
the cases in point, one occurs in a poem entitled "Influences of Natural
objects in calling forth and strengthening the Imagination in Boyhood
and early Youth"--a cumbrous heading enough. May I digress for a moment
upon the unlucky titles which Wordsworth so often prefixed to his poems,
and the improvements occasionally made in them? Surely a less convenient
caption than the one just quoted is not often met with, or a less
attractive one than this other, prefixed to an inscription not very many
times longer than itself:
"Written at the Request of Sir George Beaumont, Bart., and in his Name,
for an Urn, placed by him at the termination of a newly-planted Avenue
in the same Grounds."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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