ABSTRACT
Published for the first and only time in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The date of composition cannot be discovered more precisely than summer 1798. Lyrical Ballads was in active preparation by March or April of that year, and was ‘printed, but not published’ on 13 September (EY, 216, 227; see also my edition of Lyrical Ballads I798, vii–xx). The text given here is from Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, London, 1798, i–v, with editorial insertion of one punctuation mark.
