‘There was a gorgeous marriage feast’

This text is conjecturally reconstructed from the very rough ink draft on f. 63^r rev. of Nbk 10. It is possible that lines 2 and 3 were meant to be alternatives rather than sequential. There are several false starts on the page: ‘There was once a War in H’ is cancelled at the top, as are ‘The Devil’ and ‘At the creation’ below the lines given here. As Forman suggested in Huntington Nbks ii 185, the marriage feast in limbo may be the idea from which Sucking hydras hashed in sulphur (no. 266) was elaborated. Similarly, At the creation of the Earth (no. 285), which is fluently drafted on the previous page, may be a development, though in quite a different direction, of the germ contained in the cancelled ‘At the creation’ on this one. If, then, the present page functioned as sketch pad for the two longer texts, this fragment may be dated before either of them, in September–October 1819.