[From W. M. Rossetti, Esq., in answer to the foregoing.]
28 April [1872].
My Dear Sir,
Many thanks to you for your notes on Shelley, which I have considered attentively, and find really serviceable. Also for the National Reformer, containing a little lyric of yours characterized by sweetness and feeling.
Alastor, p. 97. "Herself a poet." As I have said in my note, I think this may be right: yet I don't think it is right. There would I conceive be a certain incongruity and bathos in saying, in this direct and matter-of-fact way, that this phantasmal unactual personage was "a poet," and tho' (as you truly point out) there is no occasion, at this stage of the poem, to inform the reader that the wanderer was "himself a poet," still I think the phrase has a logical position where it comes—the statement being that the visionary personage charmed the wanderer by her utterances regarding knowledge, truth, virtue and liberty, because these were "thoughts the most dear to him"—and regarding poetry because he was "himself a poet."
106, 7. Roots (twice over). I am sure you are right in the important correction "trunks": should probably not hesitate to introduce that word into the text if opportunity offers, or would at any rate point it out in a note as a true correction, and due to you.
107. The precipice, &c. It seems to me now that there is no grave difficulty in this passage, according to its ordinary punctuation. I used to understand the word "disclosed" as meaning "which was disclosed or revealed"; but I now understand it to mean "did unclose, was cleft."
