Another most felicitous emendation is to be found in _The Poet_, where the edition of 1830 reads:— And in the bordure of her robe was writ Wisdom, a name to shake Hoar anarchies, as with a thunderfit. This in 1842 appears as:— And in her raiment’s hem was trac’d in flame Wisdom, a name to shake All evil dreams of power—a sacred name. Again, in the _Lotos Eaters_ _Three thunder-cloven thrones of oldest snow_ Stood sunset-flushed is changed into _Three silent pinnacles of aged snow_. So in _Will Waterproof_ the cumbrous Like Hezekiah’s backward runs The shadow of my days, was afterwards simplified into Against its fountain upward runs The current of my days. Not less felicitous have been the additions made from time to time. Thus in _Audley Court_ the concluding lines ran:— The harbour buoy, With one green sparkle ever and anon Dipt by itself. But what vividness is there in the subsequent insertion of “Sole star of phosphorescence in the calm.” between the first line and the second. So again in the _Morte d’Arthur_ how greatly are imagery and rhythm improved by the insertion of Across the ridge, and paced beside the mere, between Then went Sir Bedivere the second time, and Counting the dewy pebbles, fix’d in thought. There is an alteration in Œnone which is very interesting. Till 1884 this was allowed to stand:— The lizard, with his shadow on the stone, Rests like a shadow, _and the cicala sleeps_. No one could have known better than Tennyson that the cicala is loudest in the torrid calm of the noonday, as Theocritus, Virgil, Byron and innumerable other poets have noticed; at last he altered it, but at the heavy price of a cumbrous pleonasm, into “and the winds are dead”. He allowed many years to elapse before he corrected another error in natural history—but at last the alteration came. In _The Poet’s Song_ in the line— The swallow stopt as he hunted the _bee_, the “fly” which the swallow does hunt was substituted for what it does not hunt, and that for very obvious reasons. But whoever would see what Tennyson’s poetry has owed to elaborate revision and scrupulous care would do well to compare the first edition of _Mariana in the South_, _The Sea-Fairies_, _Œnone_, _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Palace of Art_ and _A Dream of Fair Women_ with the poems as they are presented in 1853. Poets do not always improve their verses by revision, as all students of Wordsworth’s text could abundantly illustrate; but it may be doubted whether, in these poems at least, Tennyson ever made a single alteration which was not for the better. Fitzgerald, indeed, contended that in some cases, particularly in _The Miller’s Daughter_, Tennyson would have done well to let the first reading stand, but few critics would agree with him in the instances he gives. We may perhaps regret the sacrifice of such a stanza as this—