4. WRECK OF THE DEUTSCHLAND. Text from B, title from A (see description of B on p. 94). In 'The Spirit of Man' the original first stanza is given from A, and varies; otherwise B was not much corrected. Another transcript, now at St. Aloysius' College, Glasgow, was made by Rev. F. Bacon after A but before the correction of B. This was collated for me by the Rev. Father Geoffrey Bliss, S.J., and gave one true reading. Its variants are distin- guished by G in the notes to the poem. The labour spent on this great metrical experiment must have served to establish the poet's prosody and perhaps his diction: therefore the poem stands logically as well as chronologically in the front of his book, like a great dragon folded in the gate to forbid all entrance, and confident in his strength from past success. This editor advises the reader to circumvent him and attack him later in the rear; for he was himself shamefully worsted in a brave frontal assault, the more easily perhaps because both subject and treatment were distasteful to him. A good method of approach is to read stanza 16 aloud to a chance company. To the metrist and rhythmist the poem will be of interest from the first, and throughout. Stanza iv. 1. 7. Father Bliss tells me that the Voel is a mountain not far from St. Beuno's College in N. Wales, where the poem was written: and Dr. Henry Bradley that _moel_ is primarily an adj. meaning _bald_: it becomes a fem, subst. meaning _bare hill_, and preceded by the article _y_ becomes _voel_, in modern Welsh spelt _foel_. This accounts for its being written without initial capital, the word being used genetically; and the meaning, obscured by _roped_, is that the well is fed by the trickles of water within the flanks of the mountains.--Both A and B read _planks_ for _flanks_; G gives the correction. St. xi. 5. Two of the required stresses are on _we dream_. St. xii. 8. _reeve_, see note on Author's Preface, p. 101. St. xiv. 8. _these_. G has _there_; but the words between _shock_ and _these_ are probably parenthetical. St. xvi. 3. Landsmen may not observe the wrongness: see again No. 17, st. ix, and 39, line 10. I would have cor- rected this if the euphony had not accidentally forbidden the simplest correction. St. xvi. 7. _foam-fleece_ followed by full stop in A and B, by a comma in G. St. xix. 3. _hawling_ thus spelt in all three. St. xxi. 2. G omits _the_. St. xxvi. 5 and 6. The semicolon is autographic correction in B; the stop at _Way_ is uncertain in A and B, is a comma in G. St. xxix. 3. _night_ (sic). 8. Two of the required stresses are on _Tarpeian_. St. xxxiv. 8. _shire_. G has _shore_; but _shire_ is doubtless right; it is the special favoured landscape visited by the shower.