WORDSWORTH (WILLIAM)


Autograph quotation, signed and dated ("Wm Wordsworth/ Rydal Mount/ 17th July 1846"), of a stanza from Gray's 'Elegy': "For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey/ This pleasing anxious being e're resigned/ Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day/ Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?", on a slip pasted at each edge onto an album leaf, one or two fox-marks and slight paste show-through, oblong 8vo, Rydal Mount, 17 July 1846
|The younger Wordsworth was fierce in his strictures on Gray and his fondness for poetical language (see his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads) but, like the equally hostile Dr Johnson before him, seems to have been prepared to make an exception for the 'Elegy'.