The Disciple and Other Poems

George MacDonald · 1867

Twenty-six poems were assigned from the witness on 2026-08-21. The Grace of Grace was added by hand: fourteen of its sixteen lines stand on page 207 word for word, and the scorer missed six of them for a mechanical reason. Its refrain, “Had I the grace to win the grace”, opens three stanzas; the scan mangles the first into “TIT AD I the grace to win the grace”, so the poem's opening line matched the second occurrence instead, and core.body_score, whose cursor only moves forward, was left a stanza ahead of itself. The three lines of stanza one and the three of stanza two were behind the cursor and could not be reached, though all six are on the page unaltered. Only two lines genuinely differ from the corpus text (“some old man” for “ancient man”, “And I sit lowly” for “I sitting lowly”). The threshold was not lowered. The other twenty-three are a different case and were left alone. They are in this book by its printed contents, but the volume prints an earlier text than the corpus holds: MacDonald revised these poems substantially, and the corpus text — Standard Ebooks, from Gutenberg — is the later state. The Failing Track prints “Slowly and gently, as a song grows dumb” where the corpus reads “With lengthening pauses broke, the path grows dumb”; A Dream of Waking prints a stanza the corpus does not have. Those low scores are the comparison working, not failing, and assigning the poems would claim this volume prints a text it does not print. Whether the earlier text is a second record is a question for the corpus and is not decided here.