He began to repeat the ballad, and went on, never for a moment pausing in his work. Without the least attempt at what is called recitation, of which happily he knew nothing, he made both sense and music tell, saying it as if he were for the hundredth time reading it aloud for his own delight. If his pronunciation was cockneyish, it was but a little so.

The very first stanza took hold of Barbara. She sat down by Richard’s table, softly laid the dying bird in her lap, and listened with round eyes and parted lips, her rapt soul sitting in her ears.

But Richard had not gone far before he hesitated, his memory perplexed between the differing editions.

“Have you forgotten it? I am so sorry!” said Barbara. “It is wonderful—not like anything I ever heard, or saw, or tasted before. It smells like a New Zealand flower called—” Here she said a word Richard had never heard, and could never remember. “I don’t wonder at your liking books, if you find things in them of that sort!”

“I’ve not exactly forgotten it,” answered Richard. “But I’ve copied out different editions for comparison, and they’ve got a little mixed in my head.”

“But surely the printers, with all their blunders and changes, can’t keep you from seeing what the author wrote!”

“The editions I mean are those of the author himself. He kept making changes, some of them very great changes. Not many people know the poem as Coleridge first published it.”

“Coleridge! Who was he?”

“The man that wrote the poem.”

“Oh! He altered it afterwards?”

“Yes, very much.”

“Did he make it better?”

“Much better.”

“Then why should you care any more for the first way of it?”

“Just because it is different. A thing not so good may have a different goodness. A man may not be so good as another man, and yet have some good things in him the other has not. That implies that not every change he made was for the better. And where he has put a better phrase, or passage, the former may yet be good. So you see a new form may be much better, and yet the old form remain much too good to be parted with. In any case, it is intensely interesting to see how and why he changed a thing or its shape, and to ponder wherein it is for the better or the worse. That is to take it like a study in natural history. In that we learn how an animal grows different to meet a difference in the supply of its needs. In the varying editions of a poem we see how it alters to meet a new requirement of the poet’s mind. I don’t mean the cases are parallel, but they correspond somehow. If I were a schoolmaster, I should make my pupils compare different forms of the same poem, and find out why the poet made the changes. That would do far more for them, I think, than comparing poets with each other. The better poets are—that is, the more original they are—the less there is in them to compare.”