A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul

George MacDonald · 1880

The Diary of an Old Soul was placed by hand. Every one of the forty lines books.py samples from it is in this witness, in strictly increasing order, and yet the derivation scored the poem 0.03. The cause is scale, not evidence: the record is 2,569 lines, core.sample_lines takes 40 spread evenly through it, so consecutive sampled lines stand about 74 lines apart in the witness, and core.body_score only searches WINDOW = 60 lines forward from its cursor. Every gap is wider than the window, so after the first hit the cursor can never advance. Any poem longer than roughly SAMPLE times WINDOW — about 2,400 lines — is invisible to this comparison however clean the witness is, which is worth knowing before another long poem is read as absent. The threshold was not lowered; the placement rests on all forty sampled lines being found in order, checked on 2026-08-21. First edition, London, printed for the author, 1880, catalogued from the Oxford University copy; that record describes it as printed on one side of the leaf only, which is what the dedication means by the white page set against each worded page. The scan on disk, bookofstrifeinfo00macd, is the 1892 New Edition and was not used: its OCR recovers too little of a 2,569-line record to place it. The witness here is Project Gutenberg 1953, a transcription, whose own note also gives 1880. The corpus holds the whole diary as one record with no parts, while the book is in twelve monthly sections; that is a structural question about the record and it is not settled here.