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3.

Still so pale? then dearest weep;

Weep, I'll count the tears,

And each one shall be a bliss
For thee in after years.

4.

Brighter has it left thine eyes
Than a sunny rill;

And thy whispering melodies

Are tenderer still.

Shed one drop then only one

Sweetly did it die,

which are cancelled in favour of those of the text. Lord Houghton's reading of 1848,

Shed one drop (and only one),

may perhaps be deduced from the presence of a cancelled an[d] beneath then. For stanza 3 there are the three rejected lines,

Wilt thou mourn, and wilt thou sob

[blocks in formation]

and finally the stanza is left as given in the text and in the Aldine edition, Lord Houghton's earlier reading of line 3,

For each will I invent a bliss,

being struck out; while the 1848 reading more tender for tenderer in stanza 4 does not appear at all. The version of the text, which is also that of the Aldine edition, seems to me the better: it leaves the metre of stanza 4 in conformity rather with that of stanza 5 than with that of the first three. In stanza 5 there is a cancelled reading, dying for fleeting in the second line. Lord Houghton omits the E'en at the beginning of the third line from both his editions; and I think this must be one of the many cases in which there were two manuscripts.

5.

Yet as all things mourn awhile

At fleeting blisses;

E'en let us too; but be our dirge A dirge of kisses.

LINES.

I.

UNFELT, unheard, unseen,

I've left my little queen,
Her languid arms in silver slumber lying:
Ah! through their nestling touch,
Who-who could tell how much
There is for madness-cruel, or complying?

2.

Those faery lids how sleek!

Those lips how moist !-they speak, In ripest quiet, shadows of sweet sounds: Into my fancy's ear

Melting a burden dear,

How "Love doth know no fullness, and no bounds."

These lines stand next to the preceding in the Literary Remains, and are also assigned to the year 1817. In the Aldine edition the quotation in the second stanza reads

Love doth know no fullness, nor no bounds.

I leave the original version as being probably what Keats wrote, and proper to his text-just as Shelley's "dales of Hell" are more proper to Julian and Maddalo (line 41) than Milton's own "vales of Hell" would be in a text of that poem.

3.

True-tender monitors!

I bend unto your laws :

This sweetest day for dalliance was born!

So, without more ado,

I'll feel my heaven anew,

For all the blushing of the hasty morn.

SONNET.

ON THE SEA.

It keeps eternal whisperings around

Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound. Often 'tis in such gentle temper found,

That scarcely will the very smallest shell

Be mov'd for days from whence it sometime fell,
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! who have your eye-balls vex'd and tir'd,
Feast them upon the wideness of the Sea;

Oh ye! whose ears are dinn'd with uproar rude,
Or fed too much with cloying melody,-

Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quir'd!

First given among the Literary Remains in Volume II of the Life, Letters &c. (1848), and dated August 1817.

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