strength, the clear light and harmony of noon unclouded by the night at hand.

I take at random a few of the disputed or disputable passages in the text of Shelley, keeping before me the comments (issued in Notes and Queries and elsewhere) of Mr. Garnett, Mr. Palgrave, Mr. Rossetti, and others. In March and April 1868, the critic last named put forth a series of short papers on proposed or required emendations of passages evidently or apparently defective or corrupt. The first is that crucial verse in the famous "Stanzas written in dejection near Naples—"

Another reading is "earth" for "air;" which at first sight may seem better, though the "unexpanded buds" in the next line might be called things of air as well as of earth, without more of literal laxity or inaccuracy than Shelley allows himself elsewhere. As to the question whether "light" (adjective) be legitimate as a rhyme to "light" (substantive), it may be at once dismissed. The license, if license it be, of perfection in the echo of a rhyme is forbidden only, and wrongly, by English critics. The emendation "slight" for "light" is absurd.

In the eighteenth stanza of the first part of the "Sensitive Plant" there is a line impossible to reduce to rule, but not obscure in its bearing. The plant, which could not prove by produce of any blossom the love it felt, received more of the light and odour mutually shed upon each other by its neighbour flowers than did any one among these, and thus, though powerless to show it, yet