ABSTRACT
First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863 (when it was placed in ‘Lyrics’: see Appendix D, p. 747), 18632, 1868, 1888. Our text is 1855. B. inscribed lines 1–2 of the poem as the first entry in an album he gave to Mary Buchanan, daughter of the poet Robert Buchanan, in 1876 (Collections, E121). The Massachusetts Historical Society has a copy of the last stanza in B.’s hand (Collections, E120), almost certainly written out as an autograph, although for whom is not known. It is on a small sheet of notepaper, signed but not dated; it has no verbal variants, but the punctuation variants suggest that it was written out after the revisions for 1868 but before those for 1888. It does not, however, correspond to any printed text: for example, it contains a reading from 1870 at l. 50, but at l. 54 agrees with 1855–63.
