NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.
197
we should have here from one of the mightiest masters of language the most monstrous example on record of verbal deformity, of distorted and convulsed inversion or perversion of words. I suspect the word "its" to be wrong, and either a blind slip of the pen or a printer's error. If it is not, and we are to assume that there is any break in the sentence, the parenthesis must surely extend thus far—"its precipice obscuring the ravine"—i.e., the rocks opened or "disclosed" where the precipice above the ravine obscured it. But I take "disclosed" to be the participle; "its precipice darkened the ravine (which was) disclosed above." Then the sentence is left hanging loose and ragged, short by a line at least, and never wound up to any end at all. Such a sentence we too certainly find once at least in the "Prometheus Unbound" (II. 4):—
"Who made that sense which, when the winds of spring
In rarest visitation, or the voice
Of one beloved heard in youth alone,
(A line wanting)
Fills the faint eyes with falling tears?" &c.
It is waste of time to attempt any patching or furbishing of this passage by excision or substitution. Perhaps the author never observed what a gap was left in sense and grammar. As it is, we can only note the omission or oversight and pass on; unless we should please or dare to slip in by way of complement some verse of our own devising; which happily no one has done or is like to do.
The "Prometheus Unbound" has this among other and better things in common with its Æschylean models, that we want now and then a scholiast for interpreter, having at times to read it as we might read for instance