NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.
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to the revision of a schoolboy's theme. Nor are these grammatical castigations the worst examples of the singular freedom with which so true and studious an enthusiast for the fame of Shelley has thought it allowable to handle the text of his greatest poems. Under the pernicious guidance of professors and pedagogues dead and living he has been induced to dismember and disfigure such samples of lyric verse as touch the very highest top of possible perfection—songs that might have been envied by Simonides and praised by Sappho. By one of these blind (and deaf) guides he has been led to deface two stanzas of the "Skylark" after a fashion only to be paralleled, I should hope, in Bentley's Milton; to displace the pause in the second stanza so as at once to deform the meaning and destroy the music; and in the third to supplant "an unbodied" by "an embodied joy"! Even this is not the very worst of all. If there is one verse in Shelley or in English of more divine and sovereign sweetness than any other, it is that in the "Lament"—
The music of this line taken with its context—the melodious effect of its exquisite inequality[1]—I should have
- ↑ If any man of human ear can want further evidence than his own sense of harmony in support of the true and hitherto undisputed reading, he may find one instance among others of the subtle and wonderful use to which Shelley would sometimes put a seeming imperfection of this kind in the verses to Emilia Viviani:
"Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?"
Here the same ineffable effect of indefinable sweetness is produced by an exact repetition (but let no aspiring "poet-ape" ever think to reproduce it by imitation) of the same simple means—the suppression, namely, of a single syllable. And I cannot but wonder as