PREFATORY NOTE
The Journals written by Dorothy Wordsworth, and her reminiscences of Tours made with her brother, are more interesting to posterity than her letters.
A few fragments from her Grasmere Journal were included by the late Bishop of Lincoln in the Memoirs of his uncle, published in 1850. The Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland in 1803, were edited in full by the late Principal Shairp in the year 1874 (third edition 1894). In 1889, I included in my Life of William Wordsworth most of the Journal written at Alfoxden, much of that referring to Hamburg, and the greater part of the longer Grasmere Journal. Some extracts from the Journal of a Tour on the Continent made in 1820 (and of a similar one written by Mrs. Wordsworth), as well as short records of subsequent visits to Scotland and to the Isle of Man, were printed in the same volume. None of these, however, were given in their entirety; nor is it desirable now to print them in extenso, except in the case of the Recollections of a Tour made in Scotland in 1803. All the Journals contain numerous trivial details, which bear ample witness to the "plain living and high thinking" of the Wordsworth household—and, in this edition, samples of these
