Produced by Louise Hope, David Starner and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber’s Note:
This e-text is based on the 1869 (second) edition of the _Poems_. A few
apparent misprints were checked against the 1864 edition, but the texts
as a whole were not closely compared.
The text includes characters that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode)
text readers, primarily Ȝ ȝ (yogh). There are also a few Greek words in
the Index, and a handful of letters with overline or macron, such as ī.
If these characters do not display properly, or if the quotation marks
in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s
“character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may
also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1
version of the file instead.
The book has been separated into six independent units, set off by
triple rows of asterisks:
[1] Introductory Material
[2] The Pearl
[3] Cleanness
[4] Patience
[5] Glossarial Index (excluding Postscript)
[6] Collected Sidenotes (section added by transcriber: editor’s
sidenotes can be read as a condensed version of full text)
Each segment has its own footnotes and errata lists. Readers may choose
to divide them into separate files. The Notes were originally printed as
a short (12 pages) section before the Index. For this e-text they have
been distributed among their respective texts.
_Italics and other Text Markings:_
Bracketed letters are in the original.
Italicized letters within words, representing expanded abbreviations,
are shown in the e-text with braces (“curly brackets”): co{n}nyng{e}.
Readers who find this added information distracting may globally delete
all braces _in the body text_; they are not used for any other purpose.
Italic markings were omitted from forms such as “Fol. 51a.” where
the a or b was consistently italicized. Whole-word italics (in modern
editorial material only) are shown with _lines_.
In the Glossarial Index, groups of words in {braces} were printed on
consecutive lines, bracketed together. Text printed in small capitals
is shown in +marks+.
_Page Layout:_
The HTML version of this e-text offers a closer approximation of the
original page layout.
_Footnotes_ were numbered separately for each page. In this e-text,
footnotes are numbered sequentially within each text and grouped at
the end of each stanza (_The Pearl_) or section (_Cleanness_ and
_Patience_), or each subsection of the Preface. Numbered notes printed
in the side margin were treated as footnotes.
_Headnotes_ from the top of each page have been moved to the most
appropriate sentence break. They are also grouped at the beginning of
each selection to act as a detailed table of contents.
_Sidenotes_ were added by the editor to give translations or summaries.
In this e-text, they are collected into full sentences, and generally
appear immediately _before_ their original location. In _The Pearl_,
sidenotes are grouped at the beginning of each twelve-line stanza.
Sidenotes in the form [Fol. 10b] are shown in the same way as general
sidenotes. They always come directly above the relevant line or its
sidenotes, if any.
_Orphaned Quotation Marks_ are listed separately in each Errata section.
In some cases it may be possible to guess where the missing quotation
mark belongs, but it seemed safer to leave the text as printed. No
quotation marks disappeared between the 1864 and 1869 editions.]
Early English