1. ‘Afternoon in February’ taken from Longfellow’s volume The belfry of Bruges and other poems. See Longfellow 1886-1891, vol. 1, pp. 223-224. Van Gogh copied five of the six stanzas of the poem in the margin of the lithograph Going to church for the last time (The funeral in the cornfield) by J.J. van der Maaten, a print which he gave in 1877 or 1878 to his teacher M.B. Mendes da Costa. See letter 128, n. 38.

2. A rather free version after ‘My father’s close (Old French)’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the complete text reads:

Inside my father’s close,

Sweet apple-blossom blows

Three kings’ daughters fair,

They lie below it there

‘Ah!’ says the eldest one,

‘I think the day’s begun

‘Ah!’ says the second one,

‘Far off I hear the drum

‘Ah!’ says the youngest one,

‘It’s my true love, my own,

‘Oh! if he fight and win,’

‘I keep my love for him,

Oh! let him lose or win,

See Poems. London 1870, pp. 184-185.