Footnote

Oddly enough, The Ballad of Pekham Rye has, like Praeterita, an unexpectedly beautiful closing paragraph:

'Humphrey drove off with Dixie. She said, "I feel as if I've been twenty years married instead of two hours."
 He thought this a pity for a girl of eighteen. But it was a sunny day for November, and, as he drove swiftly past the Rye, he saw the children playing there and the women coming home from work with their shopping-bags, the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this.'

It was on Peckham Rye that the eight-year-old William Blake saw 'a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings spangling every bough like stars'.