A Hidden Life and Other Poems

George MacDonald · 1864

The witness is the 1864 issue, but its contents, order and pagination are those of MacDonald's Poems (London, Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857): the same poems at the same page numbers, including the Early Poems and The Gospel Women sections and the dedication to his father dated Algiers, April 1857. Read against Internet Archive bub_gb_N7tfAAAAMAAJ on 2026-08-21. The 1864 volume is that book reissued under a new title, so its year dates this printing and not the poems, and date_note and date_uncertain say so on every one of them. Whether this record should instead be Poems (1857) is unsettled and is not decided here. Fifteen poems were assigned from the witness and twenty-eight more scored between 0.25 and 0.60. All twenty-eight were looked at on 2026-08-21 and none was placed. They are in this book by its printed contents, but the volume prints an earlier text than the corpus holds: MacDonald revised these poems for the collected edition, and the corpus text — Standard Ebooks, from Gutenberg — is the later state. The volume opens Abu Midjan “It is only just / To laud good wine” where the corpus reads “If I sit in the dust / For lauding good wine”; it opens Death “When, like a garment flung aside at night” where the corpus reads “When in the bosom of the eldest night”. The comparison is reporting a real difference rather than failing to read the page, so nothing was placed and the threshold was not lowered. Whether the earlier text belongs in the corpus as a second record is a question for the corpus and is not decided here.