Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/12

vi printed or published in the usual manner. His first work, the Poetical Sketches, was indeed produced in ordinary typography, but only a few copies were issued to friends, and the little volume remained so rare, that until its recent acquisition by the British Museum it might be regarded as generally inaccessible. Our great national libraries are still very deficient in first editions of Blake. Most examples of the engraved works are widely scattered in the libraries of private collectors in this country and in America, and since the various impressions of the same book often differ from one another in contents and arrangement, the collation of several copies is necessary if incorrect conclusions are to be avoided. Still greater difficulties exist in the case of poems which Blake himself never engraved or published. The MSS. in which these are found have always been private possessions, and even when the courtesy of owners has permitted them to be made use of, the work of transcription is full of pitfalls for the copyist. Many of the poems are hastily or not over legibly written, and unfamiliarity with Blake's hand accounts for a number of errors which have crept into the published texts. Again several pieces are left by their author in rough draft, and Blake's various changes, additions, and mode of indicating his successive rearrangements of lines and stanzas, exact careful study before his final intention can be accurately determined. A few misreadings must also be attributed to the inability of editors to decipher their own transcripts, originating in this way errors which tend to become fixed. Thus we find Gilchrist, followed by all later editors, misreading 'icy dungeons' for 'my dungeons,' though the latter is clearly engraved in the original impressions of 'The Keys of the Gates.'

A further and more important source of error is to be found in the changes which some of Blake's editors have deliberately introduced. It is comprehensible that Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in his desire to present an almost unknown poet to the public in as favourable a light as