Few poets evoke spring more vividly than William Wordsworth. Who can forget the first stanza of “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” his incomparable ode to the season?

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

When Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge set to work on a second edition of Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth decided to write an essay on poetics, perhaps in response to the scorn the 1798 edition received from some critics. Wordsworth set forth his unique poetical principles in the now-famous “Preface” to the 1800 edition. In it, he wrote that “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

The Wordsworthian ideal of “recollection in tranquility” is delightfully embodied in the endpapers of this miniature book, published by Nimmo, Ray & Mitchell in Edinburgh in the 1880s. The endpapers, which look hand-painted but are in fact printed, picture a bucolic hillside scene, calling to mind Wordsworth’s beloved Lake District.

The format of Winnowings from Wordsworth, which measures only 9 centimeters high and could fit in the palm of one’s hand, seems like it is just the edition that Wordsworth would have owned, had he lived into the 1880s to see this book published. He could have slipped the volume into his coat pocket, and gone for a ramble in the woods, perhaps the wooded hillside pictured on these endpapers.

Links to Beinecke Library copies: