ABSTRACT
The two holograph versions of this fragment are in Nbk 2, where it is embedded in the L&C draft of Canto I (c. April 1817), and in Nbk 11, where it is apparently an abridged copy, untitled and undatable. In Nbk 2 S. stopped composing at Canto I stanza 25 (27 by S.’s revised numbering), postponing treatment of the Temple of the Spirit until it could be co-ordinated with that to come in Canto XII (sec headnote to L&C), and resumed several pages later with what was then intended as the beginning of Canto II. The present fragment is pencilled on the third of the intervening pages. In theory, therefore, it could have been inserted at almost any date; but Nbk 2 is devoted to the initial stages of composition of L&C and everything in it probably belongs to April-May 1817: these lines may even have been in the notebook before the draft of the major poem reached them. Except for one rhyme they are themselves in the metre of L&C.
