NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.
201
gives back the last notes of the Moon's chant before resuming a graver and deeper strain:
("When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow.
The Earth.
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.")
Mr. Rossetti would add these two last short lines to the song of the Moon, and make the Earth's part begin at the words "O gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight," &c.: to me there has always seemed to be a sweet and subtle miracle of music in the text as it stands; but how much of this effect may be the mere impression of habit and fancy, the mere fruit of the fondness of years for these verses as I have always known them, I cannot of course judge; though of course, too, I incline to take the verdict of my own delight in them.[1]
It may be worth notice that the earliest editions of Shelley's poems are sometimes accurate in small points where all others have gone wrong; for example, the first line of the speech closing the "Prometheus" runs rightly thus in the first edition:—
"This is the day, which down the void abysm,"
while from every later copy in the collected works the
- ↑ Here again I must make some partial recantation of the judgment given in my text. Exquisite as would be the echo of the parting song of the Moon given back by the deeper tone of the music of the Earth, I think now that the fantastic beauty of that single repercussive note would perhaps be out of tune with the supreme and equable harmony of the whole; and there seems full reason to attribute this probable misprint to a misreading of the interpolation of these two lines in the manuscript of Shelley.