She came back to earth with something like a heavy fall, as Mary Blanchet ran in upon her in the dark and exclaimed--
"Now, do tell me--how do you like my brother?"
To say the truth, Miss Grey did not well know. "I wonder is he an Alceste?" she asked herself. On the whole, his coming had made an uncomfortable, anxious, uncanny impression upon her, and she looked back with a kind of hopeless regret on the days when she had London all to herself, and knew nobody.
When an author, in his later editions, departs from his earlier text, he is apt to reveal some traits of his method and genius that might not otherwise have been so evident, and a poet's corrections may thus have more than a merely curious interest. Take Mr. Tennyson's, for instance: "The Princess," to say nothing of his shorter emended poems, has been, one might say, rewritten since the first edition, and his corrections are always interesting. Yet they spring, I think, from a narrower range of motive than Wordsworth's; they are directed more exclusively toward the object of artistic finish; they commonly show the poet busied in casting perfume upon the lily. Take this example from "The Miller's Daughter." In the first version of that poem, as it appeared in 1842, we are told that before the heroine's reflection became visible in the mill-pool--
A water-rat from off the bank Plunged in the stream.
Later editions give us this more graceful version of what occurred:
Then leapt a trout. In lazy mood I watch'd the little circles die; They passed into the level flood, And there a vision caught my eye.
Unquestionably that is an improvement, and of a sort which Wordsworth was continually making. But Wordsworth's corrections do not merely illustrate the effort to reach artistic finish, though very many of them are made with that intent; they have a relation to his theories, tastes, creeds, to his temperament and training, to his manner of receiving friendly or hostile criticism; and in comparing these textual variations we seem to watch the artist at his work--to enter in some sort into his very consciousness--as we see him manipulating the form or the thought of his verses:
Tà dè torneúei, tà dè kollomeleî, Kaì gnômotupeî, k'autonomázei.