Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/14

viii copy of the St. Oran volume has been found, containing a number of corrections in Mathilde Blind's handwriting. These corrections I have adopted. In arranging the contents of this collected edition I have put the three long poems first; then, under the title of "Dramas in Miniature," the narrative poems in the volume of that name, among which I have inserted poems out of other volumes which seem to belong to this group. The lyrical poems follow, arranged into groups, somewhat on the lines of my Selection of 1897. My only real difficulty was in connection with "Love in Exile," as Mathilde Blind herself published two versions of it, one in The Ascent of Man in 1889, and another in Songs and Sonnets in 1893. For the text I have followed the second version, and I have left in their places the additional, formerly unpublished, poems which were then added. But I have omitted three poems which were inserted out of Dramas in Miniature, where they form part of a set of lyrics, evidently though not formally connected together. This set of lyrics I have put as a second part of "Love in Exile," and I have added a few other poems which seem to me to belong to the same sequence of moods. Then come "Poems of the Open Air," among which I have included not only the greater part of the poems originally published under that name in The Ascent of Man, but all those in other volumes which come under the same title. The "Songs of the Orient " are reprinted, exactly as they stand, from Birds of Passage. After these come a certain number of lyrical poems which do not fit into any of the main divisions of Mathilde Blind's work, and after these the Sonnets,