We know by Longfellow's own statement to Mr. W. C. Lawton,{102} that it was his rule to do his best in polishing a poem before printing it, but afterwards to leave it untouched, on the principle that "the readers of a poem acquired a right to the poet's work in the form they had learned to love." He thought also that Bryant and Whittier hardly seemed happy in these belated revisions, and mentioned especially Bryant's "Water-Fowl," "As darkly limned upon the ethereal sky," where Longfellow preferred the original reading "painted on." It is, however, rare to find a poet who can carry out this principle of abstinence, at least in his own verse, and we know too surely that Longfellow was no exception; thus we learn that he had made important alterations in the "Golden Legend" within a few weeks of publication. These things show that his remark to Mr. Lawton does not tell quite the whole story. As with most poets, his alterations were not always improvements. Thus, in "The Wreck of the Hesperus," he made the fourth verse much more vigorous to the ear as it was originally written,-- "Then up and spoke an old sailór Had sailed the Spanish Main," than when he made the latter line read "Sailed to the Spanish Main," as in all recent editions. The explanation doubtless was that he at first supposed the "Spanish Main" to mean the Caribbean Sea; whereas it actually referred only to the southern shore of it. Still more curious is the history of a line in one of his favorite poems, "To a Child." Speaking of this, he says in his diary,{103} "Some years ago, writing an 'Ode to a Child,' I spoke of 'The buried treasures of the miser, Time.' What was my astonishment to-day, in reading for the first time in my life Wordsworth's ode 'On the Power of Sound,' to read 'All treasures hoarded by the miser, Time.'" As a matter of fact, this was not the original form of the Longfellow passage, which was,-- "The buried treasures of dead centuries," followed by "The burning tropic skies." More than this, the very word "miser" was not invariably used in this passage by the poet, as during an intermediate period it had been changed to "pirate," a phrase in some sense more appropriate and better satisfying the ear. The curious analogy to Wordsworth's line did not therefore lie in the original form of his own poem, but was an afterthought. It is fortunate that this curious combination of facts, all utterly unconscious on his part, did not attract the attention of Poe during his vindictive period.