NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.
199
not meant, for the "scorn" of Earth and her sons for Prometheus, of which he has lately complained, is not even in his eyes real; he says only that to refuse his request looks as though they scorned their saviour. But this new reading shows keen critical power and a quick-eyed ingenuity;
"And Jove—how cursed I him?"
though it may be objected that the sentence preceding comes to an abrupt and feeble close with the close of the verse; and this I think is conclusive proof that the suggestion, however ingenious, must be decisively rejected. No conjectural emendation of a great poet's text is admissible which corrects a loose or faulty phrase by the substitution of one more accurate, but also more feeble and prosaic. When in the same act the Furies are described as
"Blackening the air of night with countless wings,
And hollow underneath like death,"
the critic would take the word "hollow" as an epithet of[1]
- ↑ cast" for "castedst," he adds, "I find the same fault, where I am as much surprised to find it, in Shelley:
'Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.'"
While at work on the text of Milton, he has given us a rule which all editors and commentators would be wise to lay to heart in Shelley's case: "It is safer and more reverential to correct the punctuation of a great poet than his slightest word." Mr. Palgrave's proposal of "sea-girt" for "sun-girt city" ("Lines written among the Euganean Hills") may look plausible, but the new epithet is feeble, inadequate, inaccurate. Venice is not a sea-girt city; it is interlaced and interwoven with sea, but not girdled; pierced through with water, but not ringed about. Seen by noon from the Euganean heights, clothed as with the very and visible glory of Italy, it might seem to Shelley a city girdled with the sunlight, as some Nereid with the arms of the sun-god.