There & Back by George MacDonald (acx book reading .txt) 📕

into his hands as one of a set his father had to bind. It belonged to a worshipper of Coleridge, who had possessed himself of every edition of every book he had written, or had had a share in writing. There he read first the final form of The Rime as it appeared in the Sibylline Leaves of 1817: when he came to look at that in the Lyrical Ballads , published in 1798, he found differences many and great between the two. He found also in the set an edition with a form of the poem differing considerably from the last as well as the first. He had brought together and compared all these forms of the poem, noting every minutest variation-a mode of study which, in the case of a masterpiece, richly repays the student. It was no wonder, therefore, that Richard had almost every word of it on the very tip of his tongue.

He began to repeat the ballad, and went on, never for a moment intermitting his work. Without the least attempt at what is called recitation, of which happily he knew nothing, he made both sense and music tell, saying it as if he were for the hundredth time reading it aloud for his own delight. If his pronunciation was cockneyish, it was but a little so.

The very first stanza took hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard's table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting in her ears.

But Richard had not gone far before he hesitated, his memory perplexed between the differing editions.

"Have you forgotten it? I am so sorry!" said Barbara. "It is wonderful-not like anything I ever heard, or saw, or tasted before. It smells like a New Zealand flower called-" Here she said a word Richard had never heard, and could never remember. "I don't wonder at your liking books, if you find things in them of that sort!"

"I've not exactly forgotten it," answered Richard; "but I've copied out different editions for comparison, and they've got a little mixed in my head."

"But surely the printers, with all their blunders and changes, can't keep you from seeing what the author wrote!"

"The editions I mean are those of the author himself. He kept making changes, some of them very great changes. Not many people know the poem as Coleridge first published it."

"Coleridge! Who was he?"

"The man that wrote the poem."

"Oh! He altered it afterwards?"

"Yes, very much."

"Did he make it better?"

"Much better."

"Then why should you care any more for the first way of it?"

"Just because it is different. A thing not so good may have a different goodness. A man may not be so good as another man, and yet have some good things in him the other has not. That implies that not every change he made was for the better. And where he has put a better phrase, or passage, the former may yet be good. So you see a new form may be much better, and yet the old form remain much too good to be parted with. In any case it is intensely interesting to see how and why he changed a thing or its shape, and to ponder wherein it is for the better or the worse. That is to take it like a study in natural history. In that we learn how an animal grows different to meet a difference in the supply of its needs; in the varying editions of a poem we see how it alters to meet a new requirement of the poet's mind. I don't mean the cases are parallel, but they correspond somehow. If I were a schoolmaster, I should make my pupils compare different forms of the same poem, and find out why the poet made the changes. That would do far more for them, I think, than comparing poets with each other. The better poets are-that is, the more original they are-the less there is in them to compare."

"But I want to hear the rest of the story. Never mind the differences in the telling of it."

"I'm afraid I can't get into the current of it now."

"You can look at the book! It must be somewhere among all these!"

"No doubt. But I haven't time to look for it now."

"It won't take you a minute to find it."

"I must not leave my work."

"It wouldn't cost you more than one tiny minute!" pleaded Barbara like a child.

"Let me explain to you, miss:-I find the only way to be sure I don't cheat, is to know I haven't stopped an instant to do anything for myself. Sometimes I have stopped for a while; and then when I wanted to make up the time, I couldn't be quite sure how much I owed, and that made me give more than I needed-which I didn't like when I would gladly have been doing something else. When the time is my own, it is of far more value to me for the insides than to my employer for the outsides of the books. So you see, for my own sake as well as his, I cannot stop till my time is up."

"That is being honest!"

"Who can consent to be dishonest! It is the meanest thing to undertake work and then imagine you show spirit by shirking what you can of it. There's a lot of fellows like that! I would as soon pick a pocket as undertake and not do!"

Barbara begged no more.

"But I can talk while I work, miss," Richard went on; "and I will try again to remember."

"Please, please do."

Richard thought a little, and presently resuming the poem, went on to the end of the first part. As he finished the last stanza-

God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus!- Why look'st thou so?-With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross! '"-

"Ah!" cried Barbara, "I see now what made you think of the poem!"-and she looked down at the throbbing bird in her lap.

It opened its dark eyes once more-with a reeling, pitiful look at her, Barbara thought-quivered a little, and lay still. She burst into tears.

Richard dropped his work, and made a step toward her.

"Never mind," she said. "One has got to cry so much, and I may as well cry for the bird! I'm all right now, thank you! Please go on. The bird is dead, and I'm glad. I will let it lie a little, and then bury it. If it be anywhere, perhaps it will one day know me, and then it will love me. Please go on with the poem. It will make me forget. I'm not bound to remember, am I-where I'm not to blame, I mean, and cannot help?"

"Certainly not!" acquiesced Richard, and began the second part.

"I see! I see!" cried Barbara, wiping her eyes. "They were cross with him for killing the bird, not because they loved the beautiful creature, but because it was unlucky to kill him! And then when nothing but good came, they said it was quite right to kill him, and told lies of him, and said he was a bad bird, and brought the fog and mist!-I wonder what's coming to them!-That's not the end, is it? It can't be!"

"No; it's not nearly done yet. It's only beginning."

"I'm so glad! Do go on."

She was eager as any child. Coleridge could not have desired a better listener.

"I know! I know!" she said presently. " We were caught in a calm as we came home! My father is fond of the sea, and brought us round the Cape in a sailing-vessel. It was horrid. It lasted only three days, but I felt as if I should die. It wasn't long enough, I suppose, to draw out the creeping things."

"Perhaps it wasn't near enough to the equator for them," answered Richard, and went on:-

"Ah! well a-day! what evil looks
Had I from old and young; Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung."

"Poor man! And in such weather!" exclaimed Barbara. "And such a huge creature! I see! They thought now the killing of the bird had brought the calm, and they would have their revenge! A bad set, those sailors! People that deserve punishment always want to punish. Do go on."

When the skeleton-ship came, her eyes grew with listening like those of one in a trance.

"What a horrid, live dead woman!" she said. "Her whiteness is worse than any blackness. But I wish he had told us what Death was like!"

"In the first edition," returned Richard, much delighted that she missed what constructive symmetry required, "there is a description of Death. I doubt if you would like it, though. You don't like horrid things?"

"I do-if they should be horrid, and are horrid enough."

"Coleridge thought afterwards it was better to leave it out!"

"Tell it me, anyhow."

"His bones were black with many a crack,
All black and bare, I ween; Jet-black and bare, save where with rust, Of mouldy damps and charnel crust,
They were patched with purple and green.

"-There! What do you think of that?"

" He is nothing like so horrid as the woman!"

"She is more horrid in the first edition."

"How?"

" Her lips are red, her looks are free,
Her locks are yellow as gold; Her skin is as white as leprosy, And she is far liker Death than he;
Her flesh makes the still air cold."

"I do think that is worse. Tell me again how the other goes."

"The Night-Mare Life-in-death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold."

"Yes, the other is worse! I can hardly tell why, except it be that you get at the sense of it easier. What does the Nightmare Life-in-Death mean?"

"I don't know. I can't quite get at it."

How should he? Richard was too close to the awful phantom to know that this was her portrait.

"There's another dreadful stanza in the first edition," he went on. "It is repeated in the second, but left out in the last. I fancy the poet let himself be overpersuaded to omit it. The poem was not actually printed without it until after his death: he had only put it in the errata , to be omitted.-When the woman whistles with joy at having won the ancient Mariner,

"'A gust of wind sterte up behind,'

"-as if, like the sailors, she had whistled for it:-

"'A gust of wind sterte up behind, And whistled through his bones; Through the holes of his eyes and the hole of his mouth, Half whistles and half groans;'

"and the spectre-bark is blown along by this breath coming out of the bosom of the skeleton."

"I think it was a great mistake to leave that verse out!" said Barbara. "There is no nasty horror in it! There is a little in the description of Death!"

"I think with you," returned Richard, more and more astonished at the insight of a girl who had read