A 361: etext transcription

The number of texts inscribed across the manuscript, as well as the relations among them, are ambiguous. On A 361 a single line of text, separated by a broken horizontal line from a poem-draft, may be a brief introduction to the poem, a line associated with the text on the reverse side, or a discrete fragment, unrelated to the other texts. The poem-draft beginning, "Such (These) are the inlets of | the mind -," and composed around 1877 (THJ, RWF), may or may not be complete; a horizontal pencil line still partly visible along the bottom edge of the manuscript perhaps indicates that other stanzas, lost or deliberately excised when the paper was torn away, followed this one. The words, "Table Land," composed in a slightly different hand and in a lighter pencil, appear to have been added later. The passage on A 361a, possibly first jotted down as an autonomous fragment, appears as a trace (punctuation altered) in a letter to Sarah Maria Eaton Jenkins (J L 506), composed around 1877 (THJ). The three fragments appear to have been written during the same scene of writing.

One editorial notation is penciled on A 361a: sideways in the right margin, MTB: Gilbert's expression.