ABSTRACT

First publ. Letters of RB and EBB ii 52; repr. LK 605. Composed on or before 8 Apr. 1846, when B. quoted the lines in a letter to EBB. of that date; our text is taken from the MS of this letter (now at Wellesley College). Not previously publ. in a collection of B.’s poems and not rec. in Collections or any other reference work as B.’s; it appears to have escaped notice because it was not written out as verse, but with commas marking the line-breaks, and no initial capitals after the first; we have supplied these capitals and removed the comma from l. 1.