THE POEMS OF JOHN CLEVELAND Annotated and correctly printed for the first time NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS MCM XI T PREFACE HIS edition was originally undertaken as a thesis for the doctorate degree at Yale Uni versity. It has been completely revised and rewritten, but some innocent, yet mortifying, juvenilities may have escaped the exorcising scissors. Annotations are rendered necessary by the temporal character of many of the allusions, but I have enIdeavored to confine them to those difficulties in the text which may trouble the average reader. Some references have still eluded my search, and I shall be very grateful to any one whose reading, more inclusive than mine, will enable me to interpret the obscurities which remain. In a work which has extended over so long a period of time and which has been interrupted so often, it is too much to dare hope that there will not be gross errors. I trust that these will be reasonably few and that they will not seriously interfere with the understanding of the author. As originally this was a thesis, surely it is unnecessary to acknowledge my indebtedness to the English Faculty at Yale, but I wish to express my sense of their great kindness and consideration. In particular I owe a debt of gratitude to Prof. William 257754 L. Phelps and Prof. Henry A. Beers; this edition was undertaken at the suggestion of the first and it was aided at every point by the profound and subtle scholarship of the second. I also must state emphatically my obligation to Mr. Marshall C. Lefferts; when he gave me access to his fine private collections in this period, he rendered this work of mine possible. It remains in conclusion to gratefully acknowledge the efforts of my wife and my sister in having read the proofs. MIDDLE BAss. J. M. B. CONTENTS PAGE 9 Day Died for Grief, |