These comparisons are here carried no further than “The Sensitive Plant,” except that there is a canceled verse of Shelley’s “Curse” against Lord Eldon for depriving him of his children,—a verse so touching that I think it should be preserved. The verse beginning— “By those unpractised accents of young speech,” opened originally as follows:— “By that sweet voice which who could understand To frame to sounds of love and lore divine, Not thou.” This was abandoned and the following substituted:— “By those pure accents which at my command Should have been framed to love and lore divine, Now like a lute, fretted by some rude hand, Uttering harsh discords, they must echo thine.” This also was erased, and the present form substituted, although I confess it seems to me both less vigorous and less tender. Professor Woodberry mentions the change, but does not give the canceled verse. In this and other cases I do not venture to blame him for the omission, since an editor must, after all, exercise his own judgment. Yet I cannot but wish that he had carried his citation, even of canceled variations, a little further; and it is evident that some future student of poetic art will yet find rich gleanings in the Harvard Shelley manuscript. III A KEATS MANUSCRIPT A KEATS MANUSCRIPT “Touch it,” said Leigh Hunt, when he showed Bayard Taylor a lock of brown silky hair, “and you will have touched Milton’s self.” The magic of the lock of hair is akin to that recognized by nomadic and untamed races in anything that has been worn close to the person of a great or fortunate being. Mr. Leland, much reverenced by the gypsies, whose language he spoke and whose lore he knew better than they know it, had a knife about his person which was supposed by them to secure the granting of any request if held in the hand. When he gave it away, it was like the transfer of fairy power to the happy recipient. The same lucky spell is attributed to a piece of the bride’s garter, in Normandy, or to pins filched from her dress, in Sussex. For those more cultivated, the charm of this transmitted personality is best embodied in autographs, and the more unstudied and unpremeditated the better. In the case of a poet, nothing can be compared with the interest inspired by the first draft of a poem, with its successive amendments—the path by which his thought attained its final and perfect utterance. Tennyson, for instance, was said to be very indignant with those who bore away from his study certain rough drafts of poems, justly holding that the world had no right to any but the completed form. Yet this is what, as students of poetry, we all instinctively wish to do. Rightly or wrongly, we long to trace the successive steps. To some extent, the same opportunity is given in successive editions of the printed work; but here the study is not so much of changes in the poet’s own mind as of those produced by the