Page:Works of William Blake; poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) Volume 2.djvu/74

60 This closes the available matter from which to select a text for the "Everlasting Gospel" that shall include the literary beauties of all these morsels. The task is above the powers of any editor. The simple method is to take the only piece to which Blake has given the title himself, seventy-eight lines, and add the ninety-four, and the concluding couplet, " for dust and clay" &c, which he has indicated as intended to follow.

The result would give us the text as finally selected by the author. But the rejected portions, even the earliest and least satisfactory, that which is printed last here, contain so much scattered interest that Mr. Rossetti, it seems, had not the heart to exclude them. The result is that the Aldine text is fancifully arranged, and sometimes is unnecessarily weak in effect, wanting both continuity and cadence. It is guilty, as has been seen, of deliberate suppression of lines from the midst of paragraphs without the shadow of an excuse, even where no repetition of such lines in another portion is to be found. Much may be pardoued on account of the difficulty of the task of selection. The only editorial sin that calls for distinct notice being the unsupported and incorrect statement of the footnote that the text of the poem is given "in full."

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