Critical Essay by Alan Liu SOURCE: Liu, Alan. "On the Autobiographical Present: Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals.

" Criticism 26, no. 2 (spring 1984): 11537. In the following essay, Liu asserts that Wordsworth is a master at representing the self as part of its present occupation, a relationship he paraphrases as "I work therefore I am." A genius of the journalistic is Dorothy Wordsworth, who in 1801 became the keeper of William's memorial genius. Writes Dorothy to Coleridge on May 22, 1801:

Poor William! his stomach is in bad plight. We have put aside all the manuscript poems and it is agreed between us that I am not to give them up to him even if he asks for them.1 After William's work on "Home at Grasmere" trailed off in early 1800, and after brother and sister finished sending Lyrical Ballads to the publisher at the end of that year, there was virtually no poetic composition by William until his renewed interest in "The Pedlar" in early 1802. No comparable period in the poet's early career, except those occupied by extensive trips or visits, was quite so empty.2 In this white space of suppressed manuscripts, the labors of poetic memory subsided back into the elemental, gut-comfort of day-by-day existence. And the regulatory muse of the day-by-day was Dorothy, whose Grasmere Journals spoke on throughout the period in a perpetual embroidery of the lived present. But what can the present "be"? Worries Augustine:

In fact the only time that can be called present is an instant, if we can conceive of such, that cannot be divided even into the most minute fractions, and a point of time as small as this passes so rapidly from the future to the past that its duration is without length.3 As formalized in post-Cartesian temporal philosophy, this dilemma became the paradox of the instantaneous cogito, which knew itself as a point in successive time always desiring duration. In every instant, being stood on the brink of nothingness. The substance of the lived present, it seems to me, can only reside in the "autobiographical present," in an experience of the present that even at the moment of experience constitutes itself as a representation of presence. In the Augustinian "confession," the seminal "I am" of the autobiographical present arose as a circumvention of temporal logic built into the speaking situation.4 Mortality represented itself to eternity, the literal to the anagogic, and in the space of "morality" thus opened

between these two perspectives there was room for a sanctioned illogic of time: "sinfulness." Poised perilously between somethingness and nothingness, the state of sinfulness projected the razor edge of the present: "I sin therefore I am."5 In Cartesian "meditation" the earlier dialogic no longer applied. Cogito or "thought" was a voice that began talking in absolute isolation, and so had to invent--or, in Descartes' case, "prove"--the existence of a transcendental listener.6 Secular autobiography in the 18th century then relocated the transcendental listener in a "Reader" or "Public" implicitly surrounding the Boswellian self in every moment of its being. Stripped of ultimate authority, such an immanental listener could not tense itself against the self in a hierarchical relation susceptible of moral interpretation. "Sin" therefore had to be reinvented in some other form able to render the paradoxical somethingness/nothingness of the "now" with intuitive force. Sin became "sentiment," an all-or-nothing representation of being formed in the communal, rather than hierarchical, gap between emotional writer and moved reader: "I feel therefore I am." In the Wordsworthian reformulation, the sentiment of presence then arose from the representation of past sentiment to an implicit listener: "I felt therefore I am." Dorothy's Journals never fully command the disciplines of memory, confession, or meditation, yet nevertheless command presence: despite their seemingly undisciplined form they are always profoundly a representational or "autobiographical present." If we were only to read what is "on the page," however, the "undisciplined," "primitive," or "naive" form of the Journals would make them seem only a poorer sister of the established disciplines of presence and so belie what seems to me to be the sophistication of Dorothy's experience.7 The true idiom of Dorothy's autobiography lies not in the finished writing on the page so much as in the laborious motions of hand, body, and heart behind the writing--in writing, in other words, that is first of all part of a daily regimen of work. The Journals sketch what I will call a "complete and shared" structure of work, an outer form of presence, grounded upon an inner representation by which the working self throws itself into daily correspondence with being: "I work therefore I am." The Dome of Labor We can first observe that Dorothy's "now" appears in the Journals as a precisely delineated structure of completion and sharing. Take, for example, the pivotal date of December 21, 1801:

Monday 21st, being the shortest day. Mary walked to Ambleside for letters, it was a wearisome walk for the snow lay deep upon the Roads and it was beginning to thaw. I stayed at home and clapped the small linen. Wm sate beside me and read the Pedlar, he was in good spirits, and full of hope of what he should do with it. He went to meet Mary and they brought 4 letters, 2 from Coleridge, one from Sara and one from France. Coleridge's were very melancholy letters, he had been very ill in his bowels. We were made very unhappy. Wm wrote to him and directed the

letter into Somersetshire. I finished it after tea. In the afternoon Mary and I ironed--afterwards she packed her clothes up and I mended Wm's stockings while he was reading the Pedlar. I then packed up for Mr Clarkson's--we carried the Boxes cross the Road to Fletcher's peat house, after Mary had written to Sara and Joanna. (70-71)8 Dorothy generally records four kinds of activity at Dove Cottage: (a) the inspiration or composition of William's poetry, (b) textual work (the writing and reading of letters, journals, revisions, and manuscripts, as well as the reading of literature), (c) housework, and (d) walking or gardening in Nature.9 (I include William's poetic composition here despite his lapse in 1801 partly because our lack of Dorothy's notebook for December 23, 1800, to October 9, 1801, hides much of the lapse, but more essentially-as I will argue--because her brother's poetic work is a necessary idea for Dorothy independent of actual composition.) All four kinds occur in the entry above, though with the complication that it is Mary Hutchinson who walks, and together constitute the entirety of existence. They distribute this entirety into what John Holloway, discussing Blake's Songs of Innocence, calls a "self-completing" universe,10 a structure that can be pictured most simply (though certainly not exclusively) as a sphere. I will name this sphere the "dome of labor": Poetic Composition (William) stands at the north point; Housework (Dorothy) at the south; and Textual Work and Walking in Nature at the west and east, respectively, so as to define a horizontal line between the hemispheres of William and Dorothy. The dome of labor is first of all a structure of interactive completion. Perhaps human beings can never know the present without first simplifying each day in this way to just a few activities whose reciprocity stays constantly in mind, as expectation, while the individual concentrates on a single task. Placing ourselves in Dorothy's hemisphere, we can imagine the fulfillment she experiences when housework, onerous by itself, "expects" walking in Nature, when walking in Nature expects its completion in letter- or journal-writing, and when textual labor then closes this hemisphere of action by expecting again the more active exertions of housework. Each action refers to the others for its meaning, and provides in turn the meaning of others. More detail can be read in the dome when we realize that it is also a structure of intersubjective sharing. The dome's symmetry is marked by prohibitory division--the division of work at Dove Cottage--but such division does not impair any individual's trust in total communion. For purposes of analysis, I reduce the persons to just William and Dorothy, the permanent residents until William's marriage to Mary in October, 1802. We notice that each time William reads "The Pedlar" on December 21, and is inspired to plan future composition, Dorothy performs housework ("clapping," "mending") by his side. Poetic work and housework, frequently accompanying each other in the Journals,11 are somehow a matched set. They are matched because, by and large, they are the two unshared activities, and stand exactly opposite one another as each other's interdicted "vanishing point." Arguing along the lines Margaret Homans develops, we might say that it is forbidden for Dorothy to experience "poetic inspiration" as such; she must imagine it as a Poetry at

the vanishing point on her horizon.12 William, for his part, is blind to housework in this world--a blindness attested to in his own poetry, it might be noted, by the fact that mothers and wives are usually visible only when placed outside, not doing anything with the hands (The Prelude, 1805, IV, 207-21, for example, depicts Ann Tyson sleeping outside on Sunday). Housework is where Poetry, the acme of the "idleness" so worrisome to William and the 18th century generally, is forbidden to enter.13 Castled in indolence, or preoccupied by unworldly labor, William must imagine Dorothy's routine existence as the vanishing point on his horizon, as the domestic center of the labor he himself celebrates in "Home at Grasmere."Yet it is something gained--it is in truth A mighty gain--that Labour here preserves His rosy face, a Servant only here Of the fire-side or of the open field. &(14) Such labor, whether by the fireside or in the fields, can be likened to the contemplation-folded-into-labor of "silent poetry" that Wordsworth also cherished in the early Grasmere years. A first formulation: "silent poetry" is a faculty for imaging Nature's pure being in the immediate course of being, of wordless working and living. Like other counter-arts that artistic disciplines create for themselves, "silent poetry" is difficult to describe because it is solely a vanishing point. It seems important for an artist to court a secondary discipline whose effects he appreciates rapturously, but whose actual labor he understands not at all. Where a poet might say, "if I could only draw what I mean!", a painter--Turner, for example, who persistently titled his works with verses from his phantom epic, "The Fallacies of Hope"--might say, "if I could only write what I mean!" In the early Grasmere years, when Wordsworth's recent flirtation with the picturesque still embarrassed the visual arts, he cast the idea of direct, sensuous imaging primarily in the mold of "silent poetry," and used the phrase in 1800 specifically to describe his brother, John, whose imagination-in-activity was a vanishing point literally on the horizon at sea.15 But the phrase also applies in this period to Dorothy; the Pedlar, whose job is a sort of outdoor housework; and even the Leech-Gatherer, who, when he cons Nature's muddy water "As if he had been reading in a book" (stress mine), becomes a counter-poet, an artist-of-labor, leeching away the woes of verbalization proper through sheer persistence in activity. Second formulation: "silent poetry" is the vanishing point of poetry because it is composition's imago, a pure "reading." John reads Nature together with Anderson's British Poets at sea,16 the Pedlar is "impressed" by Nature's printing press of forms (and secondarily by Milton), and Dorothy, as she sits laundering by William's side on December 21, is the quintessence of the reader or audience. As in the case of the Leech-Gatherer, who "finds them where he may," the labor of the silent poet is not to make, but to "gather" Nature's messages. While divided by a prohibitory gap in experience, then, poetic composition and "silent" housework, William and Dorothy are imagined in this world to reside in a symmetry allowing them to refer to each other as the image of their own wholeness. Brother and sister refer to each other through the intersubjective inflection of what I earlier called "expectation," care,17 which communicates itself through actually shared activities. These mediating activities are textual work and walking or gardening in Nature. Half in the hemisphere of Poetry, and half in that of Silent Poetry (or "reading"), textual labor and recreation in Nature stand on the "horizon."

From Dorothy's vantage point, housework--laundering; baking tarts, giblet pies, bread, and cakes; binding carpets; making shoes; and all her other Grasmere cares--modulates on one side into the labor of love that is textual work, and on the other into the labor of love that is walking or gardening in Nature. These latter, twin cares, the hemispheric bounds of housework, then require for the universe to be "domed," "domesticated," or wholly shared, the imagined but proscribed labor of her brother's poetry, which binds text and Nature together. William is placed at a complementary vantage point: poetic composition modulates into the twin cares of textual production and natural recreation, which, like outstretched arms, wrap around and shelter an interdicted Silent Poetry, a muse of readership necessary to make his universe whole. By sheltering each other's portion of existence, the wilderness--which is the unexperienced--becomes enclosed. William himself approximates the splendid closure pictured in the Grasmere Journals when he watches the vanishing point or "unseen companionship" of his sister in "Home at Grasmere": Mine eyes did ne'er Rest on a lovely object, nor my mind Take pleasure in the midst of [happy] thoughts, But either She whom now I have, who now Divides with me this loved abode, was there Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned, Her Voice was like a hidden Bird that sang; The thought of her was like a flash of light Or an unseen companionship. &(18) Such, then, is an initial map of the present at Grasmere. We might sum up by saying that the present recorded in the Journals is wholly "familiar." The present is a family of actions, one action in which incomplete and unshared labors know each other, even in absence, as the strangely familiar segment of experience. I suggest an anthropological paradigm: the line of prohibition dividing the labors of "unseen companions" at Grasmere is the equivalent of the universal rule proscribing incest, the rule that in Claude Lvi-Strauss's generalization of the incest-problem creates the very possibility of a cosmos in which humans can domesticate the wild, or make the wilds cultured.19 If actions were completed and shared automatically or bodily--i.e., by "instinct"--they would be animal. But in the human present, actions are completed and shared despite the ban on direct communication or intercourse. The ban necessitates building a structure, the "family," whose completion and sharing are premised upon a higher order of unification: "society." Repetition/representation Suppose that the dome of labor so far mapped is a sentence with all terms in agreement. Then there must be a set of rules allowing the raw statement of daily existence to be transformed into the sentence. I suggest that the rules constituting the atomistic basis of completion and sharing in the dome of labor can be reduced to two complementary habits: repetition and representation. Repetition is an initial organization of experience created in the act of labor itself. The place to begin is with Dorothy's housework. Consider that housework and manual labor in general--as the songs of tribal and rustic cultures attest--is rhythm, the art of repetition. Ironing, mending, and packing, whether conceived at the stitch-by-stitch or chore-by-chore level, transform the raw continuum into a sustained binarism in which periods of automatic activity alternate with spaces of emotional subjectivity. Thus on December 21, between

Dorothy's periods of labor, runs a quiet pulse of passions and sympathies: "it was a wearisome walk & he was in good spirits & Coleridge's were very melancholy letters & We were made very unhappy. &" From such repetitive flux between acts of hand and soul, matter-of-fact absorption within and occasional reflection upon the demands of life, arises the kind of steady attention we know as everyday identity. But repetition by itself is deadly. Geometrically, repetition, or a line of events in time, is supposed to be a continuity of points, but if points are defined as units of uncompromised singleness, how can they join to create the truly continuous line of human identity? When the logic of the line becomes problematic in human thought, a characteristic solution is to shift the ground of proof by introducing another image of repetition by which to re-interpret, or represent, the line.20 Such an alternative image is the circle (which I have already privileged in the "dome" schema and will continue to highlight with the understanding that it is simply one of the clearest and most traditional models of continuity). By itself, of course, circularity is merely repetition.21 But when invoked from within the narrow viewpoint of straight-line logic, the circle becomes mythic: it represents linearity (the perimeter) as a continuous function hinging upon a point not on the line itself (the focus). The focus is the idealization of the otherwise repetitive, discontinuous "point"; it is the imagination of the point as pure continuity. Application: we can predict that Dorothy's Journals must represent repetitious labor as participating in something like a round of actions and actors, in the profound "revolution" that is the present. The geometrical analogy can also be expressed in terms of the line of "narrative." Hayden White has argued that the representation needed to convert chronologies of open-ended repetition (the "annals" form in historiography) into "chronicle" (which for the first time is "about" some subject) and then history proper is "narrative," and that narrative is cognate with the supposition of legal authority.22 Narrative constitutes by "law" a subject (e.g., a king or nation) that can have a line or curve of development liberated from mere repetition. All "law," I would add, is the law of the other: it is the legitimization of the subject as a "self" who can see itself in bounded form only from the perspective of some higher authority, some "focal point" not on the self's line. In literary narrative, the law of the other is perspectival distance. In the basic Aristotelian situation, narrative is a "complete" action whose beginning, middle, and end-incomplete and unshared as they may seem to the characters in the line of action--are presumed by anticipation from the distance of the spectator to revolve organically into each other. Within narrative itself, such perspectival distance appears as the parallax of understanding signalled by the descent of the god. We can thus predict in addition that Dorothy's Journals must be fundamentally narrative in their representation of repetition as a complete round, and that such narrative will depend on a crucial perspective shift felt not as metaphor but as authoritative law. Here we reach an impasse. Whereas it is relatively easy to see that Dorothy's Journals are repetitive, it is not so easy to see that they are a sustained, narrative representation. The journal form, after all, contours

itself along the jazz rhythms of improvisation and episode rather than the unified curve of Aristotelian tragedy. To speculate that a journal is thoroughly narrative means to argue as well that the basic circularity upon which the journalist improvises, the impersonal calendar furnishing the "plot," must be individually imagined and invested with drama. Only so can there be a true representation of repetition upon which to construct the completed and shared present. The Story of Laundry I propose to tell the story of laundry that occurs in the Journals literally in housework and figuratively in textual labor and Nature. The story of laundry is a repetitious tale that will at first seem only bad story because its true narrativity, and the moving vision at its heart, cannot appear until a perspectival shift occurs. First there is the plot of literal washing, the most time-consuming part of Dorothy's housework. We can guess from the Journals that clothes and linen at Dove Cottage in the early years were neither plentiful nor more clean than necessary. Nevertheless, laundering occupied a frightening amount of time. In 1800, when we have a fairly sustained record for seven months from spring to winter (May 14 to December 22, excluding about a month in June and July and two weeks in September), and when old Molly Fisher from across the road helped Dorothy less than in later years, washing occurred at a frequency varying from about twice per month in the summer to once per month and even less often in the winter. This does not seem excessive until we realize that washing merely initiated a whole sequence of laundering spread out over several successive days: spreading, bleaching, drying, starching, ironing, and mending. Altogether, washing and its sequalia in 1800 occupied at least twenty-four days out of the recorded seven months (more if we assume that some laundry chores went unrecorded).23 A guess would be that a full year involved some forty days of laundering. Even forty days may not be worth comment if only small parts of each day were spent at the task, but in 1800, when Dorothy compressed washing-related activities almost exclusively into periods of rain, cold, heat, or other inclemency,24 laundering swelled to consume virtually the whole of the relevant entries, implying many hours of daily work--for example:

Wednesday [May 21st]. Went often to spread the linen which was bleaching--a rainy day and very wet night.

Thursday [22nd]. A very fine day with showers--dried the linen and starched. Drank tea at Mr Simpson's. Brought down Batchelor's Buttons (Rock Ranunculus) and other plants--went part of the way back. A showery, mild evening--all the peas up.

Friday 23rd. Ironing till tea time. So heavy a rain that I could not go for

letters--put by the linen, mended stockings etc. (20) The plot of washing, of course, is thoroughly repetitive. In the history of women's narrative as figured in fabric work, Dorothy's tale of laundry would not be Ariadne's complete threading of the labyrinth but Penelope's constant ravelling and unravelling. Existence at Grasmere is an endless contest between dirt and purity. But to say that laundering is a "bad story" because it is repetitious is only part of the truth because unrelieved repetition--which is the way a machine handles laundry--is not "story" at all. For a human there is not just repetition but always also yearning for narrative. As anyone who has worked extensively in house or factory knows, humans in periods of sustained mechanical labor transform repetition into daydreaming desire for, yet frustration of, story. Sometimes such narrativistic impulse finds outlet in fully-formed stories (gossip or today's "soap operas"), but more basically, it expresses itself as a radical of narrative representation, a deep desire to make action purgative, tragic in Aristotle's sense. Laundering, of course, is the perfect icon of the narrative radical, or primitive "soap opera," immersed in labor because it is literally a purification. Proof that washing craves a purgative, even mythic dimension appears in a Journal entry such as that for September 3, 1800 (38-39). After accompanying William, John, and Coleridge part of the way to Helvellyn, Dorothy returns to spend the morning and early afternoon laundering: "A fine coolish morning. I ironed till 1/2 past three--now very hot." Then she participates in a funeral for a woman who, wholly devoid of clan ("There were no near kindred, no children"), is an uncanny antonym of Dorothy, a spectre-self embodying Dorothy's worst fears. Staged like a tragedy complete with chorus, the rite of the spectre-self precipitates an enormous cleansing of emotion in Dorothy:

I was affected to tears while we stood in the house, the coffin lying before me. There were no near kindred, no children. When we got out of the dark house the sun was shining and the prospect looked so divinely beautiful as I never saw it. It seemed more sacred than I had ever seen it, and yet more allied to human life. The green fields, neighbours of the churchyard, were as green as possible and with the brightness of the sunshine looked quite gay. I thought she was going to a quiet spot and I could not help weeping very much. When we came to the bridge they began to sing again and stopped during 4 lines before they entered the churchyard. The priest met us--he did not look as a man ought to do on such an occasion--I had seen him half-drunk the day before in a pot-house. Before we came with the corpse one of the company observed he wondered what sort of cue "our Parson would be in." Dorothy then spends most of the remaining day laundering once more: "I had not finished ironing till 7 o'clock. The wind was now high and I did not walk--writing my journal now at 8 o'clock." We recognize that on September 3 laundering brackets a passionate story of purgation, of immersion in a spectral "dark house," emotional purification, and

baptismal emergence into a same/other world of washed "green," "brightness," and "sunshine." Yet, the story of purgation thus folded within laundering is never more than craving for complete narration. There is that half-drunk Parson--the first such "half" entity we will come upon--at the close of the purgative episode. Something dirty always spoils the wash in Dorothy's universe, necessitating the repetition of laundering. Flanking the plot of literal laundering in Dorothy's world are two analogous plots equally repetitive and frustrated. First, it is fitting that Dorothy's evening hours of ironing on September 3 should be capped by an hour of writing in her Journal: laundering's regulation of emotions, or inner weather, corresponds with textual labor's regulation of days, its diurnal divisions ordering and purging identity. The incessant writing of letters and journals, perhaps, is only a daily composing--a washing, ironing, mending, and packing--of the soul. Secondly, household laundering corresponds with the incessant regulations and purgations of actual weather, with Nature's journal. Quite literally, as noticed previously, Dorothy's days of laundering occurred in near-perfect syncopation with bad weather. Nature in the Journals is God's housework, and her emotional disturbances--the peaks of beauty and storm spicing the delicate atmosphere of Dorothy's writing--require a grand washing, ironing, mending, and ordering of existence day by day. The plot of purgation in Nature is especially important. Relevant is what Nature does with "dirt." We notice that a complaint of "dirty roads," "dirty snow," "nasty miry lanes," "dirty" streets, and "dirty" towns runs through the Journals like a litany,25 peaking once just after the period under consideration in July, 1802, when Dorothy washes Hull and then London out of her mind ("Dirty, brick housey tradesmanlike & place," "Streets dirty"), and once before that on February 2, 1802, when she allies "dirt" suggestively to terror:

We walked into Easedale--were turned back in the open field by the sight of a cow. Every horned cow puts me in terror. We walked as far as we could having crossed the footbridge, but it was dirty, and we turned back. & (84) Like the "horned cow" capable of attacking people (a cow attacked Coleridge in 1802),26 dirt is a particle of terrifying disorder, of matter at home in the domestic world and yet also uncannily destructive of that world.27 Dorothy's dirt does not, however, prompt the terminal catharsis, or transcendence, of Burke's sublime, which is also a sort of gigantic "dirtiness" and animalism (black mountains and raging horses, for example). On a day-to-day basis, the story of Nature's housework in the Journals consists of nothing but an accumulation of dirt necessitating purgations that even in the act of washing merely deposit dirt elsewhere and so demand new purgations. Storms clean the sky, but muddy the fields; snow whitens the roads, but turns into sullied thaw. Sullying coexisting repetitively with washing, we might say, constitutes the "picturesque," a category whose attraction for, and yet "scrubbed"

withdrawal from, nature's ragged edges, twists, and intricacies of texture, and humanity's hovels, gypsies, and beggars, can be described as compulsive playing with dirt. The picturesque is never wholly able to cleanse the sublime from the face of beauty, and so compels the observer, once one postcard of the mind is complete, to move on to the next in search of a terminal experience.28 As in the case of household laundering, in sum, Nature's labor of cleansing always leans toward, but never accomplishes, complete story. How can the three bad stories of housework, textual labor, and Nature wash away dirt, fulfill their urge toward complete story, and so represent repetition as presence? It is important to note that the three stories appear equally repetitious only when viewed as interchangeable from an "objective" viewpoint outside Grasmere. But if we enter into the picture and assume the viewpoint of housework itself, for example, we will recognize that textual labor and Nature are not just repetitious realms identical to mundane life but distanced repetitions capable of becoming representational. The redundancy folding the story of actual laundry between textual and natural cleansings is crucial because such redundancy is a mirror making possible perspectival distance: household laundering comes to see its own repetitive line represented within the more visibly formed story of the other. Laundering, in sum, uses the idiom of other lines of repetition (most importantly, Nature's), to tell of its own complete, rounded story of purification. And what the idiom of Nature--of work as "natural"--tells from its serene distance, it tells with the authority of law: "work, therefore shall you be." Dorothy tells the revolutionary fullness of daily activity when she sees its repetitiousness reflected, most serenely, in the repetitious patterns of Nature's sky--especially the evening sky, that distant palimpsest on which each day's repetitions are represented afresh within larger, authoritative patterns of sidereal and lunar turnings--for example:

[6 Dec., 1801] & It was a sober starlight evening, the stars not shining as it were with all their brightness when they were visible and sometimes hiding themselves behind small greyish clouds. &

[7 Dec.] & The first star at Nadel fell, but it was never dark.

[9 Dec.] & We had the Crescent Moon when we went out. &

[12 Dec.] & The moon shone upon the water below Silverhow, and above it hung, combining with Silver how on one side, a Bowl-shaped moon the curve downwards. &

[17 Dec.] & Jupiter was very glorious above the Ambleside hills and one large star hung over Coombe of the hills. & (66-70) Dorothy's astronomy is not precise (she seems to have called the brightest star in any sky "Jupiter," for example),29 and so we need only look for the sky's representational meaning in its broad effects. Dorothy glories in evening-skies of exceptional purity, when stars, planets, and moon hang either in crystalline splendour or in relief against striations of clouds. The evening-sky, serving much the same function as Constable's cloud-scapes, mirrors the extent of the elapsed and coming days' purity. Yet it figures purity not just as a point in a repetitive line, but as part of the "story" of the completed month, of a full revolution from beginning to end regulated by the lunar phases. Dorothy is always looking to the moon--especially crescent moons representing most tragically the encroachment of darkness and foretelling most beautifully the purgation by which darkness can be redeemed. Specifically, crescent moons foretell the full moon, emblem of the transcendence of repetition. Gazing at the circle of the full moon on June 13, 1802, Dorothy together with William suddenly gains perspectival distance and, in an ascent parallel to the descent of the god, rises above dirty work into a purer realm: "The full moon (not quite full)," she says, "was among a company of steady island clouds, and the sky bluer about it than the natural sky blue. William observed that the full moon above a dark fir grove is a fine image of the descent of a superior being" (135). Lunar revolution, however, is not the ultimate story glimpsed in Nature's repetitions. In narratives proper, the gathering of plot into chapters (or acts, cantos, and other units of moderate inclusion) provides the initial perspectival distance necessary to project from within the bounds of plot the shape of the whole book or poem. The chapter, in other words, is the representation of overall form visible from within the line of repetitive event.30 The lunar month is precisely such a chapter-structure. Its role in the Gregorian calendar is to serve as the mysterious sub-plot (associated with religious holidays) mediating between day-by-day existence and the grandest revolution or story of all, the solar year governing work. Seen as part of the solar year, daily labor is not simply repetitious but part of a complete story of seasons in which the repetitious travails of any one season (e.g., sowing) can achieve narrative meaningfulness by foretelling those of another (e.g., harvesting). Only when Dorothy fully imagines the solar calendar in this way and then represents her personal day-by-day activity as participating in the calendar's universal story can the sense of the complete and shared present begin to emerge. Consider, once more, the entry for December 21, 1801, in which we can now notice that the solar cycle was implicit from the start. December 21 for Dorothy is not just any day but the "shortest day," winter solstice. It is a telling index in the Journals of an actively imagined solar cycle of washing--an annual representation of daily chores that consoles the perspective bound to repetition by revealing that even days of greatest darkness, when the repetitive line of dirtying and washing is most intense, participate in a larger, wholesome revolution.

To dramatize the perspectival shift by which the "shortest day" enters into the washing cycle of the year, let me sketch Dorothy's progress from terrible repetition on December 21 and 22 to joyous representation on December 26. The idea of overall purgation on the 21st, the "shortest day," is merely latent: the day is iconic for a dirty, disorderly world mandating repetitive washing. On December 21, a thaw of snow clogs motion, Coleridge's bowels are ill, stockings need to be mended, and the loose thread of Annette Vallon (who probably wrote the letter "from France") needs fixing. The intensity of repetition at the solstitial season is then confirmed by the succeeding entry for December 22, one of the most uncannily repetitive entries in the Journals (71-73). The 22nd begins with an act of personal cleanliness ("I washed my head") performed within a climate of dirt and untidiness ("The road was covered with dirty snow, rough and rather slippery"). The need to wash away literal dirt then acquires tragic urgency when yet another "melancholy" letter arrives from Coleridge detailing his illness. Such tragic urgency strengthens when the Journals mention "The Pedlar" (whose narrator is a spectator of tragedy in the original "Ruined Cottage") as well as Charles Lamb's actual tragedy, John Woodvill. Dirt plus tragedy, in Dorothy's logic, equals poverty. Thus it is fitting that the tragic spectre of Coleridge on the 22nd then adds itself to the image of a bird scratching dirtily in the road ("It was pecking the scattered Dung") to generate the description of a beggared sailor ("As we came up the White Moss we met an old man, who I saw was a beggar &"). After once more mentioning her sadness for Coleridge, Dorothy then brings all the day's tragic percussions of dirt and poverty to their final repercussion: first a touch of dirt when she describes William's futile attempt to clear the snow blocking the outhouse (he "called me out to see it but before we got there a whole housetop full of snow had fallen from the roof upon the path and it echoed in the ground beneath like a dull beating upon it"), and then a personalization of poverty when she mentions their need to "borrow money of Luff." Imagine that the outhouse is the emblem of the day so far. How to unblock it to allow the rites of cleanliness? To begin with, Dorothy takes a half measure. Succeeding the episode of the outhouse is a curiously transitional image--inserted non sequitur--of the beggar's half-unhealthy nose: "Half the seaman's nose was reddish as if he had been in his youth somewhat used to drinking, though he was not injured by it." We remember the "half-drunk" parson on September 3, 1800. The function of the beggar's nose, and of Dorothy's "half" entities in general, is to bridge dirt and purity. Where the half-drunk Parson signalled the metamorphosis of purity into dirt, the beggar's half-drunk nose now signals the reverse transmutation back into purity. Immediately after the nose, there is a dash of ambiguous connection, and then Dorothy attempts to sweep away all the day's dirt, poverty, and tragedy by imaging the pristine opposite of the outhouse, a "tempting" "Stone seat" also set amid snow:

--We stopped to look at the Stone seat at the top of the Hill. There was a white cushion upon it round at the edge like a cushion and the Rock

behind looked soft as velvet, of a vivid green and so tempting! The snow too looked as soft as a down cushion. A young Foxglove, like a star in the Centre. There were a few green lichens about it and a few withered Brackens of Fern here and there and upon the ground near. All else was a thick snow--no foot mark to it, not the foot of a sheep. For a just a moment, the repetitious dirt handled by the labor of household laundry--a labor heard in the insistent imagination of nature as a thing of fabric ("cushion & cushion & velvet & cushion")--washes away. A dreamscape like a memory of naked flesh emerges in too-perfect whiteness, softness, and roundness. And at the center of the dream of cleanliness, we spot the engine of purification: the tremendously overdetermined "Foxglove" with its onanistic ability to regenerate, all by itself, the dirty world of laundry so that it becomes as pure as the sky. The need to specify "Foxglove" amid a galaxy of fabric whispers the world of laundry; but, by sleight-of-hand, the Foxglove becomes a "star in the Centre" pointing upwards. Yet such immaculate purgation, untouched by the other, is ultimately sterile and must be repeated. After another mysterious dash, the whole tragic sweep of the day from squalor through purgation to pristineness repeats itself in an episode recalled, non sequitur, from three days ago. Dorothy reiterates the movement from outhouse to Stone seat in the succession of two women, the polluted "Queen of Patterdale" and Chaucer's pure Custance:

--When we were at Thomas Ashburner's on Sunday Peggy talked about the Queen of Patterdale. She had been brought to drinking by her husband's unkindness and avarice. She was formerly a very nice tidy woman. She had taken to drinking but that was better than if she had taken to something worse (by this I suppose she meant killing herself). She said that her husband used to be out all night with other women and she used to hear him come in in the morning for they never slept together--"Many a poor Body a wife like me, has had a working heart for her, as much stuff as she had." We sate snugly round the fire. I read to them the Tale of Custance and the Syrian monarch, also some of the Prologues. It is the Man of Lawe's Tale. We went to bed early. It snowed and thawed. Surely there is dreamwork here. A life whose repetitious cleanliness resembles Dorothy's own ("She was formerly a very nice tidy woman") transforms into its uncanny opposite, a polluted life of addiction to drink. Elided here is any recognition that the world of addictive repetition could also be represented as regenerative fertility: the "something worse" that drinking leads to could just as well suggest sexual abandon if Dorothy did not so quickly interpose an equivalent for abandon: suicide. At the close of the entry, "It snowed and thawed": what better conclusion to a day whose whole process is obsessive repetition of purgation--first the long sweep leading to the Stone seat, then the mental recapitulation of purification leading up to the mention of Custance. On the days succeeding the 22nd, dirtiness continues to accumulate

repetitiously:

[Dec. 23] A downright thaw but the snow not gone off the ground except on the steep hillsides--it was a thick black heavy air. &

[Dec. 24] Still a thaw & The Roads uncomfortable and slippery. &

[Dec. 25] Christmas day. A very bad day. We drank tea at John Fisher's-we were unable to walk & The roads very slippery. & (73) Yet, of course, sullying caused by thaw also indicates an improvement of weather. And as the weather becomes progressively more pure, a turning point is at last reached: from the 21st through Christmas, Dorothy's calendar fills increasingly with a sense of the full round of the year. Dorothy, in other words, suddenly experiences the expansion of perspective necessary to represent the dirty thaw at the solstitial season as part of a total, annual cycle of purgation. On Christmas eve, for example, the progress of the year as a whole enters all at once into her vision as she rereads her journal with satisfaction: "Thoughts of last year. I took out my old Journal" (73). By December 26, finally, the season of "shortest days" then becomes so imbued with a sense of calendrical wholeness that Dorothy glimpses what is essentially an eternal day, a season when repetitive dirtiness opens out fully into final purity and the complete and shared "story" of the present. Dawning upon a literal purgation ("& It came on very wet & The rain went off and we walked to Rydale"), the 26th matures into this vision of the washed world:

It was very pleasant--Grasmere Lake a beautiful image of stillness, clear as glass, reflecting all things. The wind was up and the waters sounding. The lake of a rich purple, the fields a soft yellow, the Island yellowishgreen, the copses Red Brown the mountains purple. The Church and buildings, how quiet they were! Poor Coleridge, Sara, and dear little Derwent here last year at this time. After tea we sate by the fire comfortably. I read aloud--The Miller's Tale. Wrote to Coleridge. The Olliffs passed in chaise and gig. Wm wrote part of the poem to Coleridge." (74) In a sense, all of Grasmere has now become a "Stone seat" or icon of purity. It has transformed into an orbicular representation of existence ("Grasmere Lake a beautiful image of stillness, clear as glass, reflecting all things")--a crystal ball of interpretation into which Dorothy can look to see the repetitious travail of life transmuted into the global purity of the "present." Though this passage glances toward what is normally called

"past," we should recognize that Dorothy really sees only the "now." What more beautiful way to sketch the present than as an all-reflectiveness expanding centrifugally to incorporate every season of existence under its self-completing dome? In this season, all domiciles--whether houses or church--open through doors of mind to shelter Coleridge, Sara, and Derwent: the others from the past who are nevertheless represented here and "now." Even the colors of this world form a domed or self-completing rainbow arcing around from purple to purple ("purple & yellow & yellowish-green & Red Brown & purple"). And in place of the tale of Custance, there is the Miller's tale with its purgative deluge restoring community and the springtime of things. It does not matter that the weather will turn dirty in the future and mandate further washings. The present has been found, and from its position here at year's end can function as Dorothy's version of a "spot of time" retaining "A vivifying Virtue." The work of Grasmere, we now see, is Dorothy's Prelude. On this holiday or illud tempus embedded within the schedule of work, William writes "part of the poem to Coleridge" (The Prelude) on the way things were, and she writes a letter to Coleridge on the way things are. A punctuation: perhaps there is no better way to close a study of Dorothy's autobiographical present than to phrase the purgation-story one last way, as the cure of illness. I believe that it is possible, and genuinely interpretive, to glimpse Dorothy's menstrual cycle in the Journals. Dorothy is not at all shy about specifying such actual afflictions as the "piles," "rheumatism," "fever," or "cold," and we can thus guess that periods of intense "illness" described only vaguely as "headache" and "feeling unwell" often cloak menstrual pains. Such a guess gains support when we find that there are periodic three- to four-day stretches of incapacitating "headaches," often sending Dorothy to bed, which occur at roughly twenty-five to thirty day intervals. In the period from the winter of 1801 to the spring of 1802, for example, there are lingering headaches or other fits of unspecified illness on December 2-5; December 26 and 28; February 4, 9; February 22, 26; March 6, 8, and 9; March 26, 28, 29, and 31; April 21, 25, 28, 29; May 12, 18; May 23, 24, 26, 27, 30; and so on.31 Supposing that Dorothy was regular, not all these dates can be relevant, but the general point, I think, is clear: there are at least several sets of entries in the Journals that record Dorothy's attention to her own bodily "month." Such an inquiry becomes interpretive rather than reductive when we realize that Dorothy's quasi-monthly cycles of "illness" trace the pattern not only of her own sickness, but of the world as a tribe of sickness. In the entry for November 23, 1801, for example, contagion is community:

A beautiful frosty morning. Mary was making William's woollen waistcoat. Wm unwell and did not walk. Mary and I sate in our cloaks upon the Bench in the Orchard. After dinner I went to bed unwell. Mary had a head-ach at night. We all went to bed soon. (60) The Journals are full of such attention to the rhythms of communal contagion--especially to the cycles of William's and Coleridge's

sicknesses.32 As if acting in unison, all these contagions tend to become most intense at the mid-winter season--Coleridge, for example, was bedridden for two weeks at Christmas in 1800--and all await the same rite of purification at New Year. Contagion is another "dirt" in repetitive existence that can only be purged by representing the self's travail in a completed and shared cosmos of pain, in the universal agon preliminary to the fully human "present." Notes The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), I, 335. Jared R. Curtis has noticed this specially "barren" period (Wordsworth's Experiments with Tradition: The Lyric Poems of 1802 [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975], p. 5). Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 266. I am aided in considering the problem of the present by Burton Pike on the "instant" in Rousseau's Confessions ("Time in Autobiography," Comparative Literature, 28 [1976], 329); Richard Jackson on the Romantic "timeless moment" ("The Romantic Metaphysics of Time," Studies in Romanticism, 19 [1980], 19-30); and James Olney on the perishable "ta onta" of the "is" ("Some Versions of Memory/Some Versions of Bios: The Ontology of Autobiography," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980], pp. 23940. My formulation of the present as a problem of Being ultimately independent of "time" is especially influenced by Olney's ontological speculations. I have also benefitted from the massive tradition of studies in Wordsworthian time, especially those works that define post-Cartesian temporality with the explicit aid of Georges Poulet's Studies in Human Time (1950). See Herbert Lindenberger, On Wordsworth's Prelude (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 131-204; Christopher Salvesen, The Landscape of Memory: A Study of Wordsworth's Poetry (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 1-45; and Eugene L. Stelzig, All Shades of Consciousness: Wordsworth's Poetry and the Self in Time, Studies in English Literature, Vol. 102 (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), pp. 1353. See also Jeffrey Baker on Wordsworth and Cartesian time (Time and Mind in Wordsworth's Poetry [Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1980], pp. 145-46. This line of thought is suggested by Georges Gusdorf: "Christian destiny unfolds as a dialogue of the soul with God in which, right up to the end, every action, every initiative of thought or of conduct, can call everything back into question" ["Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," trans. James Olney, in Autobiography, p. 33]. In describing the confessions as a single speaking situation, of course, I am simplifying. William C. Spengemann has traced in finer detail the modulation within the Confessions from confession of past sins to a form closer to Cartesian meditation: "a revelation of the self to the self, an act of self-knowledge &"

(The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980], p. 5 and passim. Salvesen, pp. 9-10, has considered Descartes' philosophy as an autobiographical mode. Lindenberger, pp. 160-62, appreciates the artistic "casualness" of Dorothy's "sensibility securely rooted in the present" as akin to the Schillerian "naive," to the "full and vivid apprehension" of a Goethe in Schiller's scheme. All quotations are from Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Mary Moorman, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971). In the interests of clarity, I have restricted my attention to the relation between Dorothy and William, and so omit one other major activity in the Journals: social visits and conversations. Blake: The Lyric Poetry (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 52. See, for example, the matching of poetic work and fabric work in Dorothy's entries for August 22, 1800, and March 9 and 23, 1802. Observes Homans, "William's primary concentration on the self and on subjectivity in poetry make Dorothy's contrasting evasions of poetic identity especially salient &" (Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Bront, and Emily Dickinson [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980], p. 42. My approach owes much to Homans' insight into the negative site of Dorothy's sensibility, its self-positioning as a not-Poetry (see Homans' chapters on Dorothy and on "The Masculine Tradition"). See Baker, pp. 113-43, on Wordsworthian "idleness." MS. B, 439-42, Home at Grasmere &, ed. Beth Darlington, The Cornell Wordsworth, gen. ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell, 1977). All quotations are from this edition. "When, To the Attractions of the Busy World," l. 80. The Letters of John Wordsworth, ed. Carl H. Ketcham (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1969), p. 123. Undergirding my thought on the present is what might be called an initiatory phenomenological approach--one that isolates the present as the experience in which the self projects its being outward as a fully-formed "world," but that then welcomes further anthropologies, sociologies, and psychologies of time. Because my phenomenology is initiatory, I have not felt obliged to respect the full, Heideggerean development of "care." MS. B, 104-112. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, rev. ed., trans. James Harle Bell, et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 29-68, 478-97.

Conceived within the post-Cartesian framework of temporality--of succession and the need to transcend succession--this becomes the reorigination problem studied by Leslie Brisman in Romantic Origins (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978). The Romantic poets, Brisman argues, sought to escape the legacy of their first origin, which condemns them to repetition, by conceiving a second origination: for the Romantic poets, "there are two births, and while one is subject to repetition and the "failure to originate," the other remains pure" (15) and constitutes "a moment whose time is always, potentially, now" (16). The "now" of this Romantic, second origin, however, is ultimately defined not as "purity" but as priority: "Returning to a second birth given both primary importance and something like temporal priority, the poets step outside the circle of imitation, repetition, and belatedness; they return to the sources of their power" (18). A worthwhile thought experiment would be to fit Dorothy into Brisman's "conception" of the male Romantics. Dorothy's representation of repetition may also be conceived as a re-origination or second "birth" issuing in a pure "now." But the specifically temporal idiom of "priority" vs. "belatedness"--and, indeed, the entire metaphor of "birth" and issue--is unavailable to her as a means of defining the purity of the "now." As Homans, p. 44, observes, Dorothy turns away from "maternal origins." Her "now," which I have outlined as a "family" structure strangely void of parental origin (cf., Homans, p. 46), is both sourceless and issueless in conception: characteristically, for example, the Journals do not remember or anticipate more than a year at a time. Perhaps the "unoriginality" of Dorothy's representations tells upon her own negation of sexual potency-her desire to unthink conception and issue--but certainly it also tells us we need to redefine "originality" generally so that it embraces the works of those who do not, like the male Romantics, make an issue of "birth." If, as Homans argues in her chapters on "The Masculine Tradition" and "Dorothy Wordsworth," literature in the male lineage seeks to act upon the Other or object, and that Other is, among other things, the mother or Mother Nature, then what Other can the writer who is already an actual mother or immaculate mother (in Dorothy's case, a "sister") act upon in order to "return to the sources of & power" and become original? (Cf., Barbara A. Schapiro's recent The Romantic Mother: Narcissistic Patterns in Romantic Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1983]; see also Brisman on "maternal presence" in his Wordsworth chapter.) The answer must be not an "Other" at all, but a "domesticated" Other from which otherness is ultimately purged. Ending his examination of Blake, Brisman points back through the "priority" to the purity of "now," through, that is, the representation of origin to the presentation of what I would call the domesticated origin or sense of things "present to us": representations, Brisman says in the words of Los, "live before us," and "if "before" cannot mean "anterior to," restoring priorities, it can mean "present to us," restoring a sense of presentness as art best can" (275). The other for Dorothy, as I will show, is "dirt." Dirt is Adamic dust, a stuff of origin, but the role of this original in Dorothy's domestic universe is to be swept out of the house so that we are left not with the art of origination and reorigination, but of a literal "purity" sufficient unto the day. A fact that Jeffrey Mehlman makes especially suggestive in his Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,

1977). "The Value of Narrativity," in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980-81), pp. 1-23. The following is a "laundry-list" for 1800 (an indicates that the laundering was done by Molly Fisher; where there is an ambiguity over the correct date of an entry, I have given Dorothy's designation): May 15 (mending), 19 (mending, drying), 20 (washing), 21 (spreading), 22 (drying, starching), 23 (ironing, mending), 27 (mending); June 2 (washing), 10 (washing), 17 (ironing), [late June to late July missing]; August 4 (spreading), 5 (drying), 6 (ironing, sewing), 18 (mending), 21 (mending), 22 (mending); September 3 (ironing), 5 (ironing), 11 (mending) (washing), [late September missing]; October 8 (drying), 9 (ironing), 16 (starching, ironing); December 15 (starching), 16 (ironing). For more information on Dorothy's laundry work, see The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, I, 160-61, 296. See the entries for the following days of laundry work: May 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 27; June 10; August 4, 5, 6, 21, 22; October 8, 9. See, for example, the entries for November 22, 1800; November 17 and December 22, 29, 1801; and February 2, 14, 18, 20 and July 25, 26, 1802 (the latter two days record the visit to Hull). In the entry for July 31, 1802, when Dorothy and William crossed Westminster Bridge on their way from London to Dover (and France), Dorothy stresses repeatedly the "pure light" and "purity" of the dawn. See Dorothy's entry for June 10, 1802. It is instructive to read Dorothy's Journals together with Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966). Douglas argues that ceremonies of pollution/purification observe the "boundaries" or defining lines of structure in a society (on boundaries, see especially p. 122) in the sense of constituting those lines even while marking their transgression. Dirt is "matter out of place," she says, and continues:

This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the byproduct of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements (p. 35). Dirt, which all societies and religions require, thus both destroys the order of things as known and makes the idea of that order knowable (see also pp. 94 and 161 on the creative potential of disorder and dirt). I am indebted to Alan J. Bewell of Yale University for directing me to Douglas's fine work.

Robert Con Davis has noted that the "intention" of Dorothy's use of the picturesque is "formal repetition" ("The Structure of the Picturesque: Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals," The Wordsworth Circle, 9 (1978), 45-49). Also pertinent to my thesis on the autobiographical present is Davis's discussion of the "time-and-eternity theme" in picturesque paintings. See Dorothy's entry for January 29, 1802. I am aided here by Philip Stevick, The Chapter in Fiction: Theories of Narrative Division (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1970). See especially the argument on "cosmic cadence," p. 88, and on parts and wholes, pp. 15-16, 99-112. A "medical-chart" for 1800-July, 1802 shows that entries recording acute "headaches" and other severe symptoms sending Dorothy to bed (symptoms specified only as "not well" or "very ill") tend to occur in clusters at mostly one-month frequencies. The following list, of course, does not account for periods missing in the Journals (again, where there is ambiguity in the dates, I have respected Dorothy's designations): 1800, May 20, 24, 27; June 3, 23; July 25, 29, 30; August 3, 22, 23, 28; October 7, 8; November 12, 14, 15, 16, 25; December 7; 1801 (Jan.-Oct. missing), October 15, 19; November 14, 18, 23, 24; December 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 19, 26, 28; 1802, February 4, 9, 22, 26; March 6, 8, 9, 26, 28, 29, 31; April 21, 25, 28, 29; May 12, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30; June 14, 30; July 3, 4. See, for example, the entries for 1800, October 5, 31; November 14, 22, 23, 28; December 1, 6, 20; 1801, October 16, 17; November 18, 23, 24; December 9, 13, 21, 22, 23.