The Little Boy lost
Father, father, where are you going
O do not walk so fast.
Speak father, speak to your little boy
Or else I shall be lost,
The night was dark no father was there
The child was wet with dew.
The mire was deep, & the child did weep
And away the vapour flew.

The Little Boy found
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand'ring light,
Began to cry, but God ever nigh,
Appeard like his father in white.
He kissed the child & by the hand led
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, thro' the lonely dale
Her little boy weeping sought.

In William Blake's Songs of Innocence appear two tiny, apparently simple poems that have, until recently, attracted relatively little critical attention. Some critics have ignored “The Little Boy lost,” and “The Little Boy found” entirely; others have treated them as relatively insignificant examples of innocence preserved.Several critics are clearly puzzled by the poems: Joseph Wicksteed, for example, finds the disappearance of the vapour in “The Little Boy lost” both mysterious and ultimately inexplicable (pp. 46–47), whereas E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has more recently admitted that the “best symbolic interpretation” of these two poems is “not characteristic of the Songs of Innocence.” Only one critic, Robert Gleckner, has argued for their importance in the Songs of Innocence, but Gleckner has perhaps gone too far in attempting to elevate them to the status of key poems in the Songs of Innocence.

To have been elected to the presidency of this great Association of men and women of good will, of knowledge, talent, and rare discrimination, constituting what is probably the biggest congeries of first-class brains in this country, is the crowning honor of any teacher's career and an awe-inspiring experience. Your president for 1960, as he prepares to vanish into oblivion after his one address in sovereign capacity, first wishes to express his gratitude to those who selected him, and his apologies for the pretentious title announced. In this country, from the beginning and throughout her entire history, action has prevailed. Yet the nation has never showed much aversion for words. Politicians, preachers, college presidents, generals, men of affairs spreading relaxation through warmed up after-dinner anecdotes, members of those faculty committees to whom, in these days of trial and error and perseverance in error, the Almighty seems to have relinquished the running of the world, all indulge their propensity for eloquence. Those whom Homer might have called the shepherds of people, in Moscow and Havana and equatorial Africa, strike back at our garrulous nation with massive retaliation. Torrents of words may flow in the sumptuous hotels where our Association once a year congregates late in December (just before the inebriating vigil through which we shall pray for a virgin year to wash out our unfulfilled promises and our harrowing regrets over unwritten articles). But your President is severely restrained by the petrifying gaze of the Executive Secretary, and prevented by tradition from falling back upon the worthiest of all themes for any academic address: the eulogy of his predecessor. His predecessor, whose steel whip sheathed in velvety skin had long guided this Association, is comfortably assured of immortality as it is. An in domitable Samson Agonistes whom no Delilah or Pamela can ever betray, he hardly needs our words of gratitude, however deeply felt, to pursue his wrestling, in Washington, with the “innumerable force of spirits armed / that durst dislike” the power of foreign languages in the dubious battle now raging on our planet.

In British Museum Addit. MS. 34360 on folio 22 occurs one stanza of rime royal entitled “The question of halsam.” It is smooth in meter, well-balanced in thought, and practically perfect in stanza form, comparing very favorably in these respects with other minor lyrics of the early fifteenth century. The popularity of this poem is attested by its presence in many manuscripts of that century and by the fact that Caxton printed it together with a second seven-line stanza also ascribed to Halsham. Both of these lyrics are found in Bodley 3896, f. 195a (MS. Fairfax 16), which affords not only the earliest, but the most authentic text of these pieces:

The worlde so wide / thaire so remuable
The sely man / so litel of stature
The grove and grounde / of clothinge so mutable
The fire so hoote / and subtil of nature
The water neuer in oon / what creature
That made is of these foure / thus flyttyng
May stedfast be as here / in his lyving

The more I goo / the ferther I am behinde
The ferther behinde / the ner my wayes ende
The more I seche / þe worse kan I fynde
The lighter leve / the lother for to wende
The bet y serve / the more al out of mynde
Is thys ffortune not I / or infortune
Though I go lowse / tyed am I with a Lune

In 1988, in the midst of the often acrimonious debates about the North American Free Trade Agreement, a button began to appear on Canadian lapels. It featured a section of the Stars and Stripes with a red maple leaf in the place of one star, and a caption read, “No, eh.” Through this image, the anti-free-trade side offered parodic resistance to what it saw as the assimilation—not to say wholesale economic engulfing—of Canada by the United States. Typically self-deprecatory, Canadian humor demanded that the rejection be couched in a gentle mocking of the national verbal tic: eh? is the terser but less elegant Canadian version of the French n'est-ce pas? and the German nicht wahr? In some ways the intellectual equivalent of NAFTA, the MLA is much older than the economic institution and somewhat less controversial. Nevertheless, it too is not unproblematic for Canadians, and to see why and how, one needs to understand something of the political and cultural relations between a very small and a very large nation when they adjoin.

Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer prize–winning novel the road (2006) addresses the cliché that at the moment of death the endangered individual experiences a “life review” during which his life “flashes before his eyes.” McCarthy's protagonist intuits that “the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death” (18). Thus, in the view of McCarthy's unnamed hero, during a crisis one must focus on survival, escape, sustenance, or the successful execution of a plan. However, once all possibilities of survival are exhausted, the dying person will experience either an intense acceleration of cognition due to panic or a slackening of interest due to the acceptance of death. In either of these two scenarios, Henri Bergson posits, all the memories of the individual's lifetime will rush into consciousness. The following essay by Georges Poulet analyzes the development of Bergson's thought on this issue, supplementing Bergson's notions with examples from literature, history, and philosophy.

The title of understudies, Mary Wilkins Freeman's 1901 short story collection, situates us in the realm of theater, of performance—the space where actors and their seconds together learn the grammars of verbal and visual representation.1 On the cover of Understudies, cameo portraits linked by garlands mimic the arrangement of actors' head shots on a playbill (fig. 1). But the profiles are those of a horse, a dog, a parrot, a monkey, a squirrel, and a cat. Freeman's book displays on its face the art of representing animals and humans—and animals as humans. And her title articulates a distinctly turn-of-the-century (if still unresolved) question: who are the understudies and who are the leads—animals or humans?

German lexicographers are practically unanimous in deriving Kartaune, together with its variant Kartauwe, from an Italian word quartana, interpreted to mean either ‘a gun of the fourth magnitude’ or one ‘which shoots a ball of 25 pounds.‘ Kluge, for example, says:

The original manuscript of this poem is preserved in Hanover, and over it is written, in Goethe's hand: “For the 17th of September, 1826.” This date Goethe crossed out, writing in its place: “ September 25, 1826.” It was printed during his lifetime, without title, at the end of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, published in 1829, and is followed by the words in parenthesis, “ Ist fortzusetzen.” Only after Goethe's death, in the Cotta edition of 1833, appears the usual title, “Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel,” doubtless added by Eckermann. Nearly all texts, with the notable exception of the Weimar edition, repeat this title. The Jubilee edition has the heading, “Schillers Reliquien.”

Growing interest in the archive as an object of study for queer criticism justifies closer attention to the concept of provenance. For archivists, provenance imparts a fundamental measure of integrity to archival collections by certifying their origin and proper order. Record origin and order, however, rely on authorial identity to establish authenticity, placing provenance in tension with queer theories that describe subjectivity as polymorphous, not fixed. That tension leads Roger Casement's official reports on the atrocities committed against rubber gatherers in South America to use provenance as a credible—rather than strictly authentic—narrative structure for publicizing British investigations of imperial violence. Recognizing provenance as a practice of representation invites reconsideration of Casement's notorious private diaries, which document his sexual interest in large penises. Instead of simply providing evidence of homosexual identity, the diaries show how impersonal fantasy becomes a constituent part of archival practice.

How could American students of intermediate French be the catalysts for a work of avant-garde French literature? This article centers on Le rendez-vous, an intermediate French-language textbook that combined a novel written by the French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet with grammatical exercises written by Yvone Lenard, a prominent textbook author and instructor of French in the United States. Focusing on previously unexamined archives of this publication, from its release in America to the publication of Robbe-Grillet's novel in France under the title Djinn, the essay reveals an unknown literary history of transnational collaboration and exchange and places new emphasis on Robbe-Grillet's formative involvement with American higher education during his literary career. Through close reading of manuscript drafts and publishers' papers, the essay demonstrates how the dynamics of global publishing and shifting trends in language pedagogy aligned to condition the production of what would become Robbe-Grillet's most commercially successful novel.

Early Hollywood horror, and Boris Karloff's portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in particular, must be understood as cultural products of the age of polio. Polio survivors have drawn attention to kinetic similarities between their experiences and Karloff's gait, but horror and polio culture also share interests in experiments on simians, shadowy medical research, and ambiguously paralytic states. As well as locating the origins of some of horror's formal conventions, this essay draws attention to a dangerous gambit played by medical authorities in 1947, when, to energize the public in the fight against polio, they exploited those conventions for an educational horror film.