page 1033 note 13 To determine the relative frequency of the concept of freedom and of competing concepts, I have made spot checks throughout Wordsworth's poems. One can only establish touchstones; no one can secure absolute agreement on what is to be understood by “image,” “concept,” or “freedom.” I should include among poetic images all beings and objects suggested concretely to the reader, but my counts depend largely on the figures of metaphor, simile, and concrete symbol. If it is difficult to determine what is imagery, it is much more difficult to determine what is a separable image. In The Excursion, written when the poet's first zeal for liberty had certainly cooled (but not chilled), I have found by my own touchstones 19 passages concerning liberty, 42 literal allusions to it, and 78 metaphors of freedom or bondage. By the inclusion of weaker images and figures and vaguer references to confinement, but still excluding most uses of the adjective free, the last number could be doubled. I do not use these numbers to convince but merely to suggest.
Concordance-counting has proved a valuable stimulus, in the patient hands of Josephine Miles, to inferences concerning a poet's diction; it is much less satisfactory for determining the frequency of concepts, because an idea can hide in an image or a circumlocution and will in any event reside in a vast number of synonyms. Yet hundreds of passages in which Wordsworth reveals a sensitivity to liberty or freedom can be isolated by searching out compounds of bind, bond, captive, chain, fetter, prison, slave, trammel, tyrant, yoke, etc., in Lane Cooper, A Concordance to the Poems of William Wordsworth (New York, 1911). For conflicting analyses see Franklyn Bliss Snyder, “Wordsworth's Favorite Words,” JEGP, xxn (1923), 253; Josephine Miles, Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion, Univ. of Calif. Pubs, in Eng., Vol. xn, No. 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1942), p. 171.