"From most of these causes I was suffering, so as not to allow me any rational confidence in my opinions when contrary to yours, which had been formed in calmness and on long reflection. Then I received your sister's letter, stating the wish that I would give up the thought of proposing the means of correction, and merely point out the things to be corrected, which--as they could be of no great consequence--you might do in a day or two, and the publication of the poem--for the immediacy of which she expressed great anxiety--be no longer retarded. The merely verbal _alteranda_ did appear to me very few and trifling. From your letter on L----, I concluded that you would not have the incidents and action interfered with, and therefore I sent it off; but soon retracted it, in order to note down the single words and phrases that I disliked in the books, after the two first, as there would be time to receive your opinion of them during the printing of the two first, in which I saw nothing amiss, except the one passage we altered together, and the two lines which I scratched out, because you yourself were doubtful. Mrs. Shepherd told me that she had felt them exactly as I did--namely, as interrupting the spirit of the continuous tranquil motion of _The White Doe_." It will be seen from this letter that Wordsworth had gone over the poem with Coleridge, and that they had altered some passages "together"; that Coleridge had read a copy of it sent to the Beaumonts, doubtless at Dunmow in Essex; that he had thought of a plan by which the poem could be immensely improved, both by addition and subtraction; but that hearing from Wordsworth, or more probably from his sister Dorothy, that Charles Lamb had also criticised its structure, he gave up his intention of sending to his friend suggestions, which evidently implied a radical alteration of "the incidents and action" of the tale. It would have been extremely interesting to know how the author of _Christabel_ and _The Ancient Mariner_ proposed to recast _The White Doe of Rylstone_. It is, alas! impossible for posterity to know this, although it is not difficult to conjecture the line which the alterations would take. Wordsworth's genius was not great in construction, as in imagination; and he valued a story only as giving him a "point of departure" for a flight of fancy or of idealization. Early in 1808 he wrote to Walter Scott asking him for facts about the Norton family. Scott supplied him with them, and the following was Wordsworth's reply. "GRASMERE, May 14, 1808.