204
NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.
or beginning, which passes without taking account as we do of years or months, days or hours. The last stanza of the "Medusa" is a mere sketch, not ripe for criticism or correction; so is the fragment of a dirge—"Rough wind, that moanest loud."
In the second line of the ninety-seventh stanza of the translated "Hymn to Mercury,"
"Thus King Apollo loved the child of May
In truth, and Jove covered them with love and joy,"
for "covered" we ought evidently to read "clothed."
In the translation of the "Cyclops," the semichorus (v. 495-502 of the Greek text) is confused and inaccurate as we now read it, and the change of "those" and "there" into "thou" is in each case a clear gain as far as the English text is concerned, though it brings us no nearer to the Greek; which runs literally thus:—
"Happy he who shouts his song
To the grape's dear fountain-springs,
For a revel laid along,
Close in arms a loved man grasping,
And on spread couch-coverings
Some soft woman-blossom clasping,
Sleek, with love-locks oiled all o'er,
Who, he cries, will open me her door?"
Shelley, working from an uncorrected text, has taken ξανθόν (the old reading for ἂνθος or κάλλος) as adjective to βόστρυχον, and has washed off from the woman's hair the sweet oil poured over the man's curls. His version, were it admissible in the eyes of more critical editors, would add grace to the charm of a most graceful strophe—that is, up to the last line, here simply misconstrued; but he has strayed again somewhat too far in his render-