| See while she speaks his arms encroaching slow Have zon’d her, heart to heart,—loud, loud, the dark winds blow. |
[13] Keats, mentally placing his story in England and writing it at Teignmouth, had at first turned this line otherwise,—‘For o’er the bleak Dartmoor I have a home for thee.’
[14] A critic, not often so in error, has contended that the death of the beadsman and Angela in the concluding stanza are due to the exigencies of rime. On the contrary, they are foreseen from the first: that of the beadsman in the lines,
| But no—already had his death-bell rung; The joys of all his life were said and sung; |
that of Angela where she calls herself
| A poor, weak, palsy-stricken, churchyard thing, Whose passing bell may ere the midnight toll. |
The touch of flippant realism which Keats had, again to Woodhouse’s distress, proposed to throw into his story at this point was as follows. For the four last lines of the last stanza Keats had proposed to write,—
| Angela went off Twitch’d with the palsy: and with face deform The beadsman stiffen’d, ‘twixt a sigh and laugh Ta’en sudden from his beads by one weak little cough. |
In printing the poem Keats, probably at the instance of Taylor and Woodhouse, reverted to the earlier and better version.
[15] May the following be counted evidence to the same effect? The old woman in Apuleius, chap. xxi, just as she is about to tell her daughter the story of Cupid and Psyche, says, ‘as the visions of the day are accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night do often chance contrary.’ Compare Keats at the end of the Ode on Indolence:—