which closes abruptly with lines which may be cited because they contain several of the very rare instances in which the draft slightly differs verbally from the text of 1866: Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead? _"Be of good cheer, wilt thou forget?" she_ said: _"For_ she that flies shall follow for thy sake, _For_ she shall give thee gifts that _will_ not take, Shall kiss that _will_ not kiss thee" (yea, kiss me) "When _I would_ not, etc." We presently come across the only Couplet in the whole poem which was cancelled in the first draft, and yet reappears in the published text. This is: Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods, The young men and the maidens and the gods, now very effectively introduced into the argument, but in the first draft destroyed with a whirling movement of the pen, so that it looks as if a dust-storm involved it. Written with frenzied violence, almost perpendicularly, the draft then presents a couplet: Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine, for which a place is now found immediately before the "Bound with her myrtles" couplet. The ecstasy of the poet seems to have suddenly flagged here, and there follows immediately, in sedate script, with even lines, the passage Alas, that neither moon nor sun nor dew Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through, Assuage me nor allay me nor appease, Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease, Till time wax faint in all his periods, which now takes its place near the very close of the poem. The actual closing lines are, in like fashion, appended to the third page of the draft. They read as follows: Till fate undo the bondage of the gods, And lay to slake _the unquenchable desire Lethean lotus on a lip of fire,_ And _pour_ around and over and under me _The wake of_ the insuperable sea. There was evidently on the poet's part no original intention of utilizing these lines as a conclusion to the poem. I give them here because they present the solitary instance of important verbal alteration to be found in the whole text of 1866.