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a foot too long: it also reads to for of in the ninth line. Mr. Buxton Forman is of opinion that these variations are decidedly genuine, but indicative of an earlier state of the poem than that adopted in Lord Houghton’s edition. However, now that we have before us Keats’s first draft of his sonnet, it is difficult to believe that the sixth line in Mr. Horwood’s version is really a genuine variation. Keats may have written,

Ocean
His tributary streams, pools numberless,

and the transcript may have been carelessly made, but having got his line right in his first draft, Keats probably did not spoil it in his second. The Athenaeum version inserts a comma after art in the last line, which seems to me a decided improvement, and eminently characteristic of Keats’s method. I am glad to see that Mr. Buxton Forman has adopted it.

As for the corrections that Lord Houghton’s version shows Keats to have made in the eighth and ninth lines of this sonnet, it is evident that they sprang from Keats’s reluctance to repeat the same word in consecutive lines, except in cases where a word’s music or meaning was to be emphasised. The substitution of ‘its’ for ‘his’ in the sixth line is more difficult of explanation. It was due probably to a desire on Keats’s part not to mar by any echo the fine personification of Hesperus.

It may be noticed that Keats’s own eyes were brown, and not blue, as stated by Mrs. Proctor to Lord Houghton. Mrs. Speed showed me a note to that effect written by Mrs. George Keats on the margin of the page in Lord Houghton’s Life (p. 100, vol. i.), where Mrs. Proctor’s description is given. Cowden Clarke made a similar correction in his Recollections, and in some of the later editions of Lord Houghton’s book the word ‘blue’ is struck out. In Severn’s portraits of Keats also the eyes are given as brown.

The exquisite sense of colour expressed in the ninth and tenth lines may be paralleled by

The Ocean with its vastness, its blue green,

of the sonnet to George Keats.

Footnote:
{1} ‘Make’ is of course a mere printer’s error for ‘mock,’ and was subsequently corrected by Lord Houghton. The sonnet as given in The Garden of Florence reads ‘orbs’ for ‘those.’