Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/121

 an editor as Mr. R. Heme Shepherd would have rearranged the poems in a way of his own. The Song of Experience with the title 'A Divine Image' ('Cruelty has a Human Heart') appears in Shepherd's edition for the first time, taken perhaps from the copy in the British Museum. The Aldine edition of Blake's Poems, edited by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, was published in 1874, and has been frequently reprinted. The editor's remarks on the last pages of his Prefatory Memoirmayhavegiven rise to some misconception. Referring to the changes introduced by Mr. D. G. Rossetti into the poems printed in Gilchrist's Life, he says : — ' These emendations were indeed great improvements, and they rectify various annoying and inexcusable laxities in point of metre or syntax, or here and there of expression. It is therefore with considerable reluctance that I abandon them, and do Blake the disservice of again presenting him without their aid,' and later : — ' At any rate, as the compositions in question have been already reproduced at a date inter- mediate between that of my brother's editing and of the present volume, and were then printed in their original shape (which term includes their occasional original shape- lessness), I have not felt justified in recurring to another form of the same poems, which, if better, as it assuredly is, is also less absolutely exact.' This explanation hardly renders it sufficiently clear that Blake's text has been restored only in the case of the Poetical Sketches, and that the Songs of Innocence and of Experience are still printed with Mr. D. G. Rossetti's emendatory readings. Since 1874 the Aldine edition appears to have been generally accepted as the standard text of Blake's Poems. It is followed in most of the subsequent editions and selections, among others, with a few fresh changes, in the large Collected Works of William Blake edited by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats. A different and more accurate text is given by Mr. W. B. Yeats in his smaller ' Muses' Library' edition of Blake.