FIRST EDITIONS.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1216, 26 August 1911, Page 9

FIRST EDITIONS.

The ordinary lover of literature as a rulo contents himself in the matter of first editions with those of tho chief poets of his dav, when he can liavo them at market value, and with whatever windfall ho may have from time to timo at a bookstall " Ho will be interested, however, without- being lured iato tho dangerous .patlia f .pf /the (Collector, by: the series,, o. reprints" of rare editions of the poets which the Oxford Press is at present tnrniug out. Such volumes are never absoluto facsimiles. They do not, as a rule, reproduce the broken letters or errors of alignment which may have existed in the original ,and which aro often tho onlv tests by which to distinguish whether a book is genuine or not. Their chief value is that they give us the first reading;. If one wish sto know uhcthe.r Wordsworth ever really wrote the "all silent and all damned" stanza which Shelley quoted as the epigraph to his "Peter Bell the Third," or whether. tho poet's first idea was— It was a fresh and glorious world, ! A banner bright that was unfurled Before me suddenly, tho form preferred by Matthew Arnold, or . Before mo shone a glorious worldFresh as a banner bright, unfurled To music suddenly. \ he turns to such a reprint. To the incorrigible ■ edition-hunter who sneers at all such publications as mere ."mock turtle" tho amateur can easily rejoin that ou tho other hand his pursuit is -a mere "tic." It is much less reasonable, for example, to,pay a large, sum for a first edition than, say, for. a picture by an old master. The picture is unique, while the volume is oue of a thousand, many of which may still survive. Further, from no other picture nor from any reproduction of tho picture itself' can one receive precisely the same a.rtistic impres-. sion, whereas to a lover of literature the poetry is poetry, whether read in the rarest of volumes or in a paper-covered booklet of the market value of three halfpence, finally, the picture is much more personal to the artist than tho mere material volume is to the poet, and it has to tho owner something o'f the value of a relic to him who executed it. ite knows whose brows bent over the canvas and whose fingers hold the brush. Into his feeling enters . (be sentiment which Longfellow had for his fragment r.f Dn.ntD s coffin. "Think of it," Lon«ni o il, "vJ ''? sas \ >"«?* ago tho bit of wood in that box touched Dante s .bones." It is the holograph manuscript that is the analogue to the liicture.-"Manchestcr Guardian "