has an accent over the “e” in a past participle for poetical reasons, I have marked an e-acute with an apostrophe (as in “belov’ed”) and marked an e-grave with a grave accent (as in “charm`ed”) to indicate the intended pronunciation.  For a fully formatted version, with italics, extended characters, et cetera, please refer to the HTML version of this collection of poetry, released by Project Gutenberg simultaneously with this plain text edition.  The longest line in this plain-text file is 72 characters; this means that in some poems I had to wrap the ends of very long verses to the next line.

Footnotes.  In the printed source footnotes are marked with an asterisk, dagger, et cetera and placed at the bottom of each page.  In this electronic version I have numbered the footnotes and placed them below each section or poem.

Contents.  I have removed the page numbers from the contents list.  Text in brackets are my additions, giving alternate/earlier published titles for the poems.

Waiting for the May.  This poem was published under the title of “Summer
Longings” in “The Bell-Founder and Other Poems,” 1857.

Oh! had I the Wings of a Bird.  This poem was published under the title of “Home Preference” in The Bell-Founder and Other Poems, 1857.

Ferdiah.  The ballad between Mave and Ferdiah includes some long lines of text that would require (due to electronic publishing line length standards) occasionally breaking a line ending to make a new line.  Because there is an internal rhyme in these lines, and for more consistent formatting, I have decided to break every line here at the internal rhyme, but not capitalizing the beginning of resultant new line.  For example, “Which many an arm less brave than thine, which many a heart less bold, would claim?” is one line of verse in the 1882 edition, but I have formatted it as “Which many an arm less brave than thine, / which many a heart less bold, would claim?” For purposes of recording errata below, I have not numbered these new pseudo-lines.  The word “creit” is taken directly from the Irish text untranslated—­a roughly equivalent English word is “frame.”

The Voyage of St. Brendan.  Note 56 refers to a puffin (Anas leucopsis) or ‘girrinna.’  The bird, at least by 2004 classification, is not a puffin but a barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) and I found one reference to its Irish name as ‘ge ghiurain.’  As these birds nest in remote areas of the arctic, people were quite free to invent stories of their origins.

The Dead Tribune.  The subject of this poem is Daniel O’Connell (1775-1847), an Irish political leader and Minister of Parliament.  In ill health, his doctor advised he go to a warmer climate; he died en route to Rome for a pilgrimage.  The 1882 edition has the word “knawing” which is an obsolete variant of “gnawing”; the latter appears in the 1884 edition.

A Mystery.  The spelling of “Istambol” is intentional—­the current “Istanbul” was not adopted until the twentieth century.  The name probably derives from an old nickname for Constantinople, but the complexity of this city’s naming is beyond the capacity of a footnote.