“Sometime am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.”
Caliban in Tempest, II. ii.
[98] This old word for a snack between meals is used by Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and I believe still survives at some of the public schools.
[99] This notice of Reynolds’s parody was printed, with some revision, in the Examiner for April 26, 1819.
[100] There is no other autograph copy of this famous poem except the draft here given. It contains several erasures and corrections. In verse 3 Keats had written first, for “a lily” and “a fading rose,” “death’s lily” and “death’s fading rose”: in verse 4, for “Meads,” “Wilds”: in verse 7, for “manna dew,” “honey dew”: in verse 8, for “and sigh’d full sore,” “and there she sigh’d”; in verse 11, for “gaped wide,” “wide agape”: and in verse 12, for “sojourn,” “wither.”
[101] Sic: obviously for “run” or “go.”
[102] In all probability the Ode to a Nightingale, published in the July number of the Annals of the Fine Arts, of which James Elmes was editor.
[103] This and the next interpolation are Brown’s.
[104] So copied by Woodhouse: query “battle-axe”?
[105] Keats’s quotation from his first draft of Lamia continued, says Woodhouse, for thirty lines more: but as the text varied much from that subsequently printed, and as Woodhouse’s notes of these variations are lost, I can only give thus much, from an autograph first draft of the passage in the possession of Lord Houghton.
[106] Keats here copies, with slight changes and abridgments, his letter to Tom of July 23, 1818 (see above, p. 147), ending with the lines written after visiting Staffa: as to which he adds, “I find I must keep memorandums of the verses I send you, for I do not remember whether I have sent the following lines upon Staffa. I hope not; ’twould be a horrid bore to you, especially after reading this dull specimen of description. For myself I hate descriptions. I would not send it if it were not mine.”