entirely, and so continued on our course as best we could. The ice that had gathered on our cordage and on the outside of the motor gondolas fell off in pieces, striking the propellers, which batted it against the vessel's side. Other ice, which had formed on the propellers themselves, was likewise hurled in all directions. Consequently we passed several hours of extreme anxiety, during which the whole crew was constantly on the watch to repair holes in the outer skin and the gas bags. Luckily the gas bags had been made extra strong in contemplation of this very possibility; but we could never be sure that they would hold out. We no longer scanned the pack ice beneath us with purely Plantonic feelings, but with a lively appreciation of the fact that it might become our only highway to safety. Finally atmospheric conditions improved somewhat and we were able to take a course beneath the clouds which was comparatively free from moisture.

Our magnetic compass exhibited erratic variations because the deviation kept changing. Now and then, however, the sun would pierce the clouds and enable us to take an observation. Our sun compass, which was fastened outside the gondola, had become a block of ice and was useless. Just as we crossed the Alaska coast a little west of Point Barrow, however, we were able to determine a north-and-south course by solar observations; but we did not know our latitude, because the fog had prevented our seeing the earth below to estimate our speed. Consequently, about forty-eight hours after leaving King's Bay, we took a course approximately parallel with the Alaska coast. A rising wind from behind increased our speed, but it was very misty, and the deep snow concealed the contour of the land; so we rose to a higher elevation, hoping to sight more favor

able atmospheric conditions farther south. Nothing resulted from this, and we later descended closer to the ground, although at some risk of driving headlong into a mountain-side through the dense fog.

We continued navigating more or less blindly in this manner until finally a lucky solar observation indicated that we were directly over Bering Strait. We now struck a moist air current which deposited ice rapidly on the outer envelope of the airship. This was a much greater danger than it had been a few hours before, because we had already exhausted our patching materials.

It was therefore decided to land at the first opportunity. We headed directly toward the east, but soon discovered that this carried us over open water and then across an ice field. Conditions seemed no better farther south. We therefore steered a little more to the northward, where ice conditions seemed to be better, but we made slow progress.

During the last night of our journey we signaled constantly, hoping to ascertain our position from some wireless station, but in vain. Finally we found ourselves again over land, and saw several Eskimo huts. We attempted to descend in order to inquire our position, but violent squalls prevented. Thereupon we ascended through the clouds to an elevation where we could ascertain our latitude by a solar observation. In doing so we drifted a considerable distance inland, so that we required a full hour to regain the coast after descending to a lower level.

The fog was now exceedingly dense, but we began to hear the wireless apparatus at Nome receiving signals from some other station, and were able to ascertain our approximate position from that. Conjecturing that we were about over Cape Prince of Wales, we turned northwest, following the coast

line; but the wind from the mountains was exceedingly violent and tossed us about incessantly, so that our barograph needle danced around like that of a seismograph during an earthquake. Again we lost our exact position, for the violent tossing of the vessel did not permit us to descend low enough to see the earth through the mist. As the wind continued to increase in force, we finally decided to land at Teller and not to try to reach Nome, as the terrain seemed to be fairly good at the former point. But we all knew what it meant to moor our vessel in such weather without assistance from the earth, and were prepared for the worst.

Our first supper in Teller was an unforgettable event. The hot coffee tasted like ambrosia, for every member of the Norge's crew had suffered intensely from the cold for hours at a time, especially when the fog was the worst and the air was filled with moisture. The moment we opened a cabin window to make an observation a dank, chill mist would pour in and fill the cabin, making the work of the observers, who had to manipulate their instruments with bare hands, exceedingly difficult.

No sooner was our ship safely on land than we tried to get into connection with the wireless station at Nome, in order to notify the world that we were safe. But the Teller station had not been working for two years, and we signaled for several hours without result. It was not until we had repaired our own sending apparatus, twentyfour hours later, that we established a connection. It was rather exciting during the interval to keep picking up signals calling for the Norge, showing that we were supposed to be drifting over the ocean farther south.

Amundsen, Ellsworth, and Wisting immediately left Teller, and will await

the other members of the expedition at Nome. We leave as soon as the airship is completely dismantled. Amundsen and his two companions drove out over the ice with dog sleds for more than twenty miles before they reached open water. A big three-ton motor boat which is to take them to Nome had to be hauled the same distance by dog sleds.

During our flight every member of the crew was so busy with his duties, navigating, steering, and attending to the wireless and the motors, that no one had time to think of danger. We now realize how narrowly we escaped destruction, and how largely we owe our safety to a combination of good luck and wise prevision. Probably we were in greatest danger when we were crossing Alaska at a low altitude in a violent northwestern storm and nearly lost our course. The big ship was carried along only one hundred or one hundred and fifty feet above the ground at a rate of nearly sixty miles an hour. The ice- and snow-covered landscape flew past us as rapidly as it does through the windows of an express train.

Before Amundsen left us, every member of the expedition offered him his services for a new exploration. Our leader answered: 'When I was a young man I made up my mind to travel over the whole world, to reach both Poles, and to make the Northwestern and the Northeastern Passages. I have done all that. Another generation can now take a hand.'

We have been hard at work taking the vessel to pieces and packing it in boxes to be shipped back to Rome, where it will be reassembled. It received only minor injuries during the landing, and can easily be rebuilt. But the first day was spent resting up from our seventy-one hours of arduous labor.

Riiser Larsen, to whom was confided the difficult task of navigating the vessel, steered her safely over an unknown course through fog and snow, and against violent head winds, and, although he had but fragmentary observations to guide him, was able to report to Amundsen and Ellsworth, forty-six hours after we left King's Bay, that Point Barrow on the coast of Alaska was in sight.

Colonel Nobile watched with tireless attention every manœuvre of the vessel and every movement of its complicated machinery. The result of the flight fully justified the wise provisions he had made for a winter journey. He had foreseen with remarkable prescience the very difficulties and dangers that we actually encountered. For example, had he not anticipated the possibility that ice from the propeller would be thrown against the side of the vessel, and strengthened the gas bags of that section of her hull to provide against this, we

should probably have been forced to land on the polar ice.

Wisting, the quartermaster of the Norge, had but four hours' sleep during our whole period in the air. Gottwaldt, Storm, and Johnsen, our radio operators, were almost continuously at their apparatus, taking meteorological observations and trying to pick up messages from wireless stations. As long as our antennæ and generators were free from ice we were in continuous touch with land stations and knew precisely where we were. The Italian members of our crew, Cecioni, Arduino, Caratti, Poella, and Allessandrini, — and also Omdal, were in almost constant attendance on our motors, utilizing the brief periods when they were off duty to assist in patching the vessel's skin.

Our provisions consisted of buttered bread, hard-boiled eggs, meat, and cake, all of which froze solid. Indeed, even the coffee and tea in our thermos flasks were cold.

LONG since Professor de Selincourt put lovers of poetry in debt by his indispensable editions of Keats and Spenser. He now enriches the obligation past price by a book like a landmark not hereafter to be removed. For the study of English poetry in an age of rebirth, revelation of its dominant poetic genius in the morning of the romantic movement, this recovery of original docu

1 From the Observer (London Moderate Sunday paper), May 2

ments is easily the chief event of its kind in recent years. With the permission and help of Mr. Gordon Wordsworth, the poet's grandson, Mr. de Selincourt has investigated and collated all the manuscript copies of The Prelude. He solves the long-lingering mystery concerning a work marvelous in its imaginative passages and standing by itself in literature as an autobiography of the spirit. It was not issued until immediately after Words

worth's death at the age of eighty. For half his lifetime and more he had reserved it from the world.

Those who, like the present writer, own the first edition as published by Moxon in 1850 reckon it among their beloved possessions. There was reason to suspect from the beginning that when the prophet of Nature became a pillar of orthodoxy he tampered with the earlier record of his vehement youth and revolutionary fervors, and no less with his fresher style.

In our time suspicion became certainty. Now at last we have all the evidence, personal and literary. Professor de Selincourt prints on opposite pages the text as we have hitherto known it, and the poem as read to Coleridge at Coleorton over forty years before, about the end of 1806. The changes, suppressions, and late additions are shown. Alternative readings are given from the other manuscripts and fragmentary drafts. The introduction is a full account of the material and a thorough analysis of its meanings. At the end there is a long array of notes explaining the origin of particular passages and their relationship to Lake Country scenes. notice only one small error. In the passage

We

the printer has slipped in an 'and' of his own after 'beautiful' and spoiled the line. The whole is a masterpiece of minute and exhaustive editing, -a foundation work for the restudy of Wordsworth, embodying more faithful pains than readers not specially interested in the subject can easily appreciate or conceive. But the others, when they close the book, can see that not only labor in the usual sense has gone into it. Life has gone into it. The

infinite pains have been devoted to a labor of exceeding love.

Let us take the personal problem first. Without this new self-given light upon it the literary question cannot be understood. What Wordsworth wrote of another was true of himself:

Thy soul was like a star, and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free.

The vision and faculty divine of his earlier genius, differing almost inexplicably from anything there had been in the world before, abide with us undimmed. After the war began we turned to him again - well for us had we continued - when all other utterance failed. But the convention about Wordsworth as the ideal respectable man has long since been demolished. It was a colossal myth. By comparison with Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, even Keats, the author of 'Tintern Abbey,' 'Peel Castle,' and the rest of the lyrical miracles, the author of the sonnets next to Shakespeare's, or, as some think, above, was shown to the world as a moral monument representing some unique British secret of well-regulated conduct and safe opinions. Then Professor Émile Legouis discovered his youthful romance that he loved too well a lady in France, that they had the child Caroline, whose French descendants are still living, and that he behaved afterward much more like a cautious self-preserver than a gallant man. Professor Harper's biography of him showed that the earlier ardors of one who became the consecrated oracle of the higher kind of safe men had been those of a kindled revolutionary. He of all men was for a time antipatriot and pro-French.

What of it? At Orléans or Blois he met Annette Vallon, five years older than himself. He was not yet twenty

two. He was a very young and unprepared person in delirious circumstances. The atmosphere of France at the beginning of 1792 was enough to turn the head and bosom of any young islander exalted to the snows and stars by idealizing imagination but charged with repressed emotion and full of physical susceptibility. These things make him far more interesting as a human being and intelligible as a poet. We understand how he accumulated wisdom by a rapid intensity of enraptured and lacerating experiences. His practical control was never shaken again, and by degrees his poetic temperament attained serene sovereignty.

Driven back to England, as he says in his blank way, by 'want of funds,' he was indeed in dire poverty. Soon he knew himself the father of a French child and knew he ought to be the husband of a French woman. To a poet in the making these are considerable ideas. Naturally he was in violent love with France itself. In this situation the two countries went to war. That disaster he had never dreamed of anticipating. To him it was earthquake and devastation—an inward convulsion such as he never knew before or after. He thought Pitt's policy wicked. He longed at first for the defeat of his own country. In the original version, as Mr. de Selincourt shows, he felt and wrote things that in these days would have earned him the name of proBoche or Bolshevik. He declared of an English Cabinet that they

Thirsted to make the Guardian Crook of Law A tool of Murder.

...

Giants in their impiety alone,
But, in their weapons and their warfare, base
As vermin working out of reach, they leagu'd
Their strength perfidiously to undermine
Justice, and make an end of Liberty.

All this was toned down decorously in the poem as we have had it hitherto;

and Wordsworth, we find, fabricated much later in life the laudatory passage, 'Genius of Burke!' whom for reasons of love and politics alike he must have loathed as the archreactionary during the period described in the eleventh book of The Prelude. He learned more and more that Burke was an Isaiah in his splendor of warning and sense of futurity. Against aggressive and despotic France, Wordsworth becomes an indignant patriot and gradually a broad Conservative. Accordingly he, like Burke, has been called an apostate. It is a partisan imbecility. This 'Tory Chartist' was in favor of popular education and county franchise for the rural laborer half a century before those reforms were granted. When his whole heart and intellect came back to his own country, his inspired sonnets uttered the soul of the soul of high patriotism and ordered liberty, and expressed the grandeur and pathos of historic tradition with an imaginative power and a moral glory that no poet of England or of any nation has excelled.

For the first time the original version on Professor de Selincourt's left-hand pages shows the intensity of the agony that swayed the young man torn between love and prudence, between his utter Englishness and his revolutionary enthusiasm, his passion for the country of the woman who ought to have been his wife and where a French child was his daughter. Nothing in the more flamboyant lives of Byron and Shelley matches this for romantic poignancy. But Wordsworth's psychology was astounding. Prudence conquered because the only alternative was the madness, to which he had been tempted for a moment, of renouncing his nation worse, his pays, his Lake District and becoming a very bad Frenchman. He was no great lover, but a rapt sublime egotist, — - 'Na