“They pass together playfully / . . . / The torrent tosses by” (MS VIII; Poems [1850];
Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—In a second pattern of revision
peculiar to the poem,
“Ehrenbreitstein”, lines 35–38 introduced changes in the
1850 text, but the revision is based on a version of these lines as they had been altered using deletion and addition in the
MS VIII draft, alterations that were abandoned for the original version in the
MS IX
fair copy. That is, in
MS VIII Ruskin originally composed
“The rivers pass full playfully, / . . . / The river tosses by”; and in
MS IX he fair‐copied those lines.
But
MS VIII also shows an alteration of these lines to “They pass together playfully / . . . / The torrent tosses by”;
and this version is what appears in the
1850 and
1903 texts. Thus, we have evidence that the compilers of the
Poems (1850),
John James Ruskin and
W. H. Harrison, were interested in
Ruskinʼs
earlier rough drafts of poetry. Alternatively, it is possible that the revisions in
MS VIII were not ignored
in
1833–34 when fair‐copying the
“Account”,
but rather were made years later, prompted by the editing of the
Poems (1850).
The hand in which the changes are made in
MS VIII does appear to be that of the younger
Ruskin, but such small changes allow meager basis for analysis.