It remains to be said that a certain number of Wordsworth's poems--and these were, as we might expect, among his best--have stood unchanged in all the editions from the first, running the gauntlet of their author's critical moods for half a century, and coming out untouched at last. I will not call them uncorrected poems, but rather poems in which all the needed corrections were made before their first publication, for they belong to that exquisite class of creations--too small a class, even in the works of the greatest masters--in which the poet has fused completely the refractory element of language before pouring it out into the mould of poetic form. Among these untouched poems are three from the "Lyrical Ballads"--"A slumber did my spirit seal," "Three years she grew in sun and shower," and "She dwelt among the untrodden ways"--all written at the age of twenty-nine; such are the "Yew Tree," written four years later, and "She was a phantom of delight." Several of the best sonnets, too, were unchanged; as that on "Westminster Bridge," and "Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour." And lastly, I may mention one or two changes of text which Wordsworth did not make, but which belong to the class for which careless editors or proofreaders are responsible. An edition well known to the American public is especially peccant in this respect; that beautiful line, for instance, in "The Pet Lamb"-- And that green corn all day is rustling in thy ears, becomes, That green cord all day is rustling in thy ears. And here is a really interesting _erratum_; it occurs in the poem of "The Idiot Boy," where it has stood unnoticed for twenty years and more. Wordsworth's stanzas, describing the boy's night-long ride under the moon, "from eight o'clock till five," hearing meanwhile "the owls in tuneful concert strive," originally put these words into his mouth, the actual words of his hero, as Wordsworth tells us in a note: The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Sun did shine so cold, Thus answered Johnny in his glory. But this reading puzzled the proofreader. How could the sun shine at night? This being clearly impossible, he restored the idiot boy to partial sanity. He made him say: The cocks did crow to-whoo, to-whoo, And the Moon did shine so cold; and the only wonder is that he did not also read, The cocks did crow cock-a-doodle-doo. Some one proposes, I believe, a similar emendation in "As You Like It," intending to make the Duke speak better sense than Shakespeare put into his mouth. He is to say, Sermons in books. Stones in the running brooks, and good in everything. But while in the main the text of Shakespeare is bettering under criticism, Wordsworth is suffering miscorrection; and for the good that he has to give us we cannot quite dispense with the original editions. TITUS MUNSON COAN. PORTRAIT D'UNE JEUNE FEMME INCONNUE, GALERIE DE FLORENCE.