The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 370 pages of information about The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3.

The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 370 pages of information about The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley — Volume 3.

11. 2 4 12-18.  The construction is faulty here, but the sense, as Professor Woodberry observes, is clear.

12. ...but who rains down, etc. (2 4 100.) The editio princeps (1820) has reigns—­a reading which Forman bravely but unsuccessfully attempts to defend.

13.  Child of Light! thy limbs are burning, etc. (2 5 54.) The editio princeps (1820) has lips for limbs, but the word membre in Shelley’s Italian prose version of these lines establishes limbs, the reading of B. (Locock).

14.  Which in the winds and on the waves doth move, (2 5 96.) The word and is Rossetti’s conjectural emendation, adopted by Forman and Dowden.  Woodberry unhappily observes that ’the emendation corrects a faultless line merely to make it agree with stanzaic structure, and...is open to the gravest doubt.’  Rossetti’s conjecture is fully established by the authority of B.

15. 3 4 172-174.  The editio princeps (1820) punctuates:  mouldering round These imaged to the pride of kings and priests, A dark yet mighty faith, a power, etc.  This punctuation is retained by Forman and Dowden; that of our text is Woodberry’s.

16. 3 4 180, 188.  A dash has been introduced at the close of these two lines to indicate the construction more clearly.  And for the sake of clearness a note of interrogation has been substituted for the semicolon of 1820 after Passionless (line 198).

17.  Where lovers catch ye by your loose tresses; (4 107.) B. has sliding for loose (cancelled).

18.  By ebbing light into her western cave, (4 208.) Here light is the reading of B. for night (all editions).  Mr. Locock tells us that the anticipated discovery of this reading was the origin of his examination of the Shelley manuscripts at the Bodleian.  In printing night Marchant’s compositor blundered; yet ’we cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper.’

19.  Purple and azure, white, and green, and golden, (4 242.) The editio princeps (1820) reads white, green and golden, etc.—­white and green being Rossetti’s emendation, adopted by Forman and Dowden.  Here again—­cf. note on (17) above—­Prof.  Woodberry commits himself by stigmatizing the correction as one ’for which there is no authority in Shelley’s habitual versification.’  Rossetti’s conjecture is confirmed by the reading of B., white and green, etc.

20.  Filling the abyss with sun-like lightenings, (4 276.) The editio princeps (1820) reads lightnings, for which Rossetti substitutes lightenings—­a conjecture described by Forman as ’an example of how a very slight change may produce a very calamitous result.’  B. however supports Rossetti, and in point of fact Shelley usually wrote lightenings, even where the word counts as a dissyllable (Locock).

21.  Meteors and mists, which throng air’s solitudes:—­ (4 547.) For throng (cancelled) B. reads feed, i.e., ‘feed on’ (cf.  Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire, 3 4 110)—­a reading which carries on the metaphor of line 546 (ye untameable herds), and ought, perhaps, to be adopted into the text.

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