ABSTRACT
S. inscribed a copy of this love lyric on a blank page in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1819 which he presented to Sophia Stacey on 28 December 1819, the day before she left Florence. Time Long Past (no. 275) and Love's Philosophy (no. 264) are inscribed on other pages. (For S.’s relations with Sophia Stacey, see headnote to no. 271 Thou art fair, and few are fairer.) The Literary Pocket-Book was a small portable diary and notebook, edited by Leigh Hunt and published by Charles Ollier, which was issued annually in November for the following year from 1818 to 1822. Hunt no doubt sent the 1819 issue to S. as a token of appreciation, having ‘taken the liberty’ of including Marianne's Dream (see headnote to no. 138) among the original poems in the volume. The first two stanzas of Goodnight are drafted in pencil overwritten with ink on f. 48r rev. of Nbk 10; an incomplete draft of stanza three in pencil corrected in ink follows on f. 48v rev. A somewhat untidy fair copy of the first two stanzas only is transcribed on p. 118 rev. of Nbk 14, evidently because S. made the transcription before completing stanza three. A fair copy in S.’s hand of all three stanzas entitled Song (in what appears to be Mary's hand) was transcribed into Harvard Nbk 1. Another fair copy by S. (now in the Pierpont Morgan Library: M.A. 3223) was sent, probably in autumn 1821, to either Leigh Hunt or Charles Ollier for publication in The Literary Pocket-Book for 1822 where it appeared in print for the first time signed with a Gk capital sigma 2. Mary published the poem without date in 1824 but in 1839 placed it among the poems written in 1821, perhaps because Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book for 1822 had appeared in November 1821, though she may have known of and wished to disguise its connection with Sophia Stacey. Her text in both 1824 and 1839 is identical to that in LPB, save for one minor difference of punctuation.
