confidence Keats himself would have dropped had he lived to reprint. This at once made necessary the rearrangement which in any case I should have made in order that the emphasis of place in the volume should fall upon the worthiest work. Under the old plan of putting first the contents of the 1817 volume, the reader's first impression came entirely from the earliest and crudest work. This was manifestly unfair alike to reader and to poet; and I venture to believe that the order in the present volume is one which more nearly does justice to the poems than that before adopted. The question of spelling and punctuation has been a most teasing one. Keats was by no means accurate in his orthography, and he did not live to outgrow a certain boyish extravagance in his feeling for the picturesque effect of antique spellings. The associations called up in his mind by the sight of words spelled as they had been by Elizabethan poets were so delightful that he forgot that to the average reader such orthographies would seem not picturesque but simply illiterate. He introduced confusion, moreover, by a constant want of uniformity. Lilly' on one page is 'lily' on the next, and so on for a long list of words which the curious may find in Forman's exhaustive edition. Editors have struggled with Keats's confused and confusing orthography with various results. It seemed the simplest and wisest course in an edition meant for the student and the general reader to adopt as far as possible the ordinary modern spelling throughout. I recognize the fact that this involves a loss, for I appreciate fully the value of an appeal to the eye by the form of a word. On the whole, however, the loss seems to be outweighed by the gain in the avoidance of confusion and of the danger of a flavor of illiteracy, and he who objects to this innovation is respectfully recommended to examine carefully the orthography of the Keats texts before pronouncing final judgment. The matter of punctuation has been more difficult still, since an experienced writer means a point as definitely as he means a word. With Keats, however, a point is frequently rather a confession of confusion than the expression of a conviction. He was not infrequently in evident doubt in regard to what punctuation he did mean. I have meddled as little as possible with his punctuation, but even in cases where Keats read the proof-sheets I have not been constrained by a superstitious reverence for obvious and confusing errors simply because they were his. The whole question is whether an editor is to be bound slavishly to the letter or is within proper limits to insist upon the freedom of the spirit. I believe deeply in treating the work of the masters with reverence; but I believe also that the truest reverence is shown when devotion is guided by common sense. JUNE, 1895. A. B. |