Written in 1799 and published first in 1800. Wordsworth says of it:
"Written at Goslar in Germany. It was founded on a circumstance told me
by my Sister, of a little girl, who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire,
was bewildered in a snowstorm. Her footsteps were traced by her parents
to the middle of the lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her,
backward or forward, could be traced. The body, however, was found in
the canal."