Page:The poetical works of William Blake; a new and verbatim text from the manuscript engraved and letterpress originals (1905).djvu/290

244 of a folded sheet, the preceding page of which contains part of the draft of Blake's Additions to his Catalogue of Pictures for the Year 1810 ; and it must have been written later than jS as it has the amended form of 1. 8, found in y^ and y^. But there are no grounds for Messrs. Ellis and Yeats' conjecture that these lines are ' an afterthought, intended to supersede much of the rest of the poems read ' poem '] but rejected by the author before he made up his mind how to fix them in.' Probably all the fragments of ' The Everlasting Gospel ' were first written, like e, upon separate pieces of paper, which were afterwards copied into, or merely loosely inserted in, the MS. Book. The comparatively small number of corrections made in /? show that it must have been copied from an earlier draft, and the loss of 77 (perhaps also of 5) may be attributed to the same cause. This passage has no place assigned to it, but its natural position would appear to be immediately before ^, where I print it in the present arrangement. The fourteen lines beginning ' The Vision of Christ that thou dost see ' (a) are introductory to the whole poem, to which they are probably meant to serve as prologue. The interpolation e still leaves the epilogue at the end of the poem as at first intended.

A small part only of ' The Everlasting Gospel ' was included among the ' Poems hitherto Unpublished ' in Gil- christ (1863) ; Mr. D. G. Rossetti there printing the prologue (11. 3, 4 omitted) and 43 of 96 11. of ^, under the title ' The Woman taken in Adultery.' A much more comprehensive selection is given by Mr. Swinburne [Essay, 1868, pp. 148- 175), who prints altogether 253 11., enriched by running commentary. Here and there slight emendations are made, such as ' This life's dim windows of the soul ' for ' This life's five windows of the soul'; but Blake's text is, for the most part, reverently treated. Mr. Swinburne's extracts have obviously been chosen with a view to elucidating his author's meaning, and there is consequently no attempt at strict sequence.

In the Aldine Edition (1874) Mr. W. M. Rossetti states that ' this wholly amazing and partly splendid poem is now published in full for the first time,' adding ' I have done my best to arrange the verses into some sort of order and method ; with what success, the reader must judge.' The omission of y^ and a few odd couplets rejected for various reasons, reduce the entire number of lines in this version to 313. The poem as reconstructed by Mr. W. M.