Vol. I., page 223, "Laodamia," stanza beginning, "Be taught, O faithful Consort."] Wordsworth thus dropped, for one reason or another, many passages from his poems. But did he abandon entire poems? That did not often happen. He strove patiently to perfect the form of his thought; but he was unwilling to let the substance of it go. In the seven volumes of his poetry, as they now stand, but two poems are lacking, to the best of my knowledge, of all that he ever published. One of these, an unimportant piece beginning, "The confidence of youth our only art," was printed with the "Memorials of a Tour on the Continent" (1822), and no longer appears in the collected editions. The other missing poem, "Andrew Jones," was abandoned for reasons, as I think, of considerable critical interest. In the "Lyrical Ballads" it began thus: I hate that Andrew Jones: he'll breed His children up to waste and pillage: I wish the press-gang or the drum With its tantara sound would come, And sweep him from the village! This poem may be found (with, slight emendations) as late as the edition of 1815; but after that date I meet with it nowhere but in foreign reprints. Why was it dropped? It is doubtless a story of unrelieved though petty suffering; it corresponds, in small, to what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls the "poetically faulty" situation of Empedocles, a situation "in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done." But, on the other hand, that fragment of Æschylus, the "Prometheus Bound," in which everything is endured and nothing done, yet remains a work of the deepest interest: nor need we think that Wordsworth abandoned his little poem for a reason so refined as that which led Mr. Arnold to abandon one of his own. There was, as I take it, a moral reason which led to Wordsworth's decision; namely, that the story of "Andrew Jones" is told with bitterness of feeling from beginning to end; and against bitterness of feeling Wordsworth had recorded, during his earlier years, a striking protest. We shall read it presently; but first let us couple with the poem a sentence from his prose--a sentence full of the same feeling, and which was early dropped for the same reason. We shall find it in the edition of 1815, in the essay supplementary to the famous Preface of that date. There Wordsworth turns upon his critics as follows: "By what fatality the orb of my genius (for genius none of them seem to deny me) acts upon these men like the moon upon a certain description of patients, it would be irksome to enquire: nor would it consist with the respect which I owe myself to take further notice of opponents whom I internally despise." This is not quite in the vein of the serenely meditative poet; and if we look back to a time twenty years earlier than this, we shall find that Wordsworth had reproved his heat beforehand. In 1795, when he first chose definitely the poet's career, he had written these lines: