same with 'Second Best.' It is quite true there is a horrid falsetto in
some stanzas of the 'Gipsy Child'--it was a very youthful production. I
have re-written those stanzas, but am not quite satisfied with the poem
even now. 'Shakespeare' I have re-written. 'Cruikshank' I have
re-titled, and re-arranged the 'World's Triumphs.' 'Morality' I stick
to--and 'Palladium' also. 'Second Best' I strike out and will try to put
in 'Modern Sappho' instead--though the metre is not right. In the
'Voice' the falsetto rages too furiously; I can do nothing with it;
ditto in 'Stagirius,' which I have struck out. Some half-dozen other
things I either have struck out, or think of striking out. 'Hush, not to
me at this bitter departing' is one of them. The Preface I omit
entirely. 'St. Brandan,' like 'Self-Deception,' is not a piece that at
all satisfies me, but I shall let both of them stand."

In 1879 he wrote with reference to the edition of his poems in two
volumes--

"In beginning with 'early poems' I followed, as I have done throughout,
the chronological arrangement adopted in the last edition, an
arrangement which is, on the whole, I think, the most satisfactory. The
title of 'early' implies an excuse for defective work of which I would
not be supposed blind to the defects--such as the 'Gipsy Child,' which
you suggest for exclusion; but something these early pieces have which
later work has not, and many people--perhaps for what are truth faults
in the poems--have liked them. You have been a good friend to my poems
from the first, one of those whose approbation has been a real source of
pleasure to me. There are things which I should like to do in poetry
before I die, and of which lines and bits have long been done, in
particular Lucretius, St. Alexius, and the journey of Achilles after
death to the Island of Leuce; but we accomplish what we can, not what we