At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush [1] that sings loud, it has sung for three years: Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees 5 A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. Green pastures she views [A] in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail; 10 And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only [2] dwelling on earth that she loves. She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade: The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, 15 And the colours have all passed away from her eyes! [3] * * * * * VARIANTS ON THE TEXT [Variant 1: 1820. There's a Thrush ... 1800.] [Variant 2: 1802. The only one ... 1800.] [Variant 3: The following stanza, in the edition of 1800, was omitted in subsequent ones: Poor Outcast! return--to receive thee once more The house of thy Father will open its door, And thou once again, in thy plain russet gown, May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own. [i]] * * * * * FOOTNOTE ON THE TEXT [Footnote A: Wordsworth originally wrote "sees." S.T.C. suggested "views."--Ed.] * * * * * SUB-FOOTNOTE ON VARIANT 3 [Sub-Footnote i: "Susan stood for the representative of poor '_Rus in urbe_.' There was quite enough to stamp the moral of the thing never to be forgotten; 'bright volumes of vapour,' etc. The last verse of Susan was to be got rid of, at all events. It threw a kind of dubiety upon Susan's moral conduct. Susan is a servant maid. I see her trundling her mop, and contemplating the whirling phenomenon through blurred optics; but to term her 'a poor outcast' seems as much as to say that poor Susan was no better than she should be, which I trust was not what you meant to express." Charles Lamb to Wordsworth. See 'The Letters of Charles Lamb', edited by Alfred Ainger, vol. i., p. 287.--Ed.] * * * * * 1798 A NIGHT PIECE Composed 1798.--Published 1815. [Composed on the road between Nether Stowey and Alfoxden, extempore. I distinctly recollect the very moment when I was struck, as described,--'He looks up, the clouds are split,' etc.--I. F.] Classed by Wordsworth among his "Poems of the Imagination."--Ed. * * * * *