strength, the clear light and harmony of noon unclouded by the night at hand.

I take at random a few of the disputed or disputable passages in the text of Shelley, keeping before me the comments (issued in Notes and Queries and elsewhere) of Mr. Garnett, Mr. Palgrave, Mr. Rossetti, and others. In March and April 1868, the critic last named put forth a series of short papers on proposed or required emendations of passages evidently or apparently defective or corrupt. The first is that crucial verse in the famous "Stanzas written in dejection near Naples-"

"The breath of the moist air is light.”

Another reading is "earth" for "air;" which at first. sight may seem better, though the "unexpanded buds" in the next line might be called things of air as well as of earth, without more of literal laxity or inaccuracy than Shelley allows himself elsewhere. As to the question whether "light" (adjective) be legitimate as a rhyme to "light" (substantive), it may be at once dismissed. The license, if license it be, of perfection in the echo of a rhyme is forbidden only, and wrongly, by English critics. The emendation "slight" for "light" is absurd.

In the eighteenth stanza of the first part of the "Sensitive Plant" there is a line impossible to reduce to rule, but not obscure in its bearing. The plant, which could not prove by produce of any blossom the love it felt, received more of the light and odour mutually shed upon each other by its neighbour flowers than did any one among these, and thus, though powerless to show it, yet

"Loved more than ever,

Where none wanted but it, could belong to the giver :"

in other words, felt more love than the flower which gave it gifts of light and odour could feel, having nothing to give back, as the others had, in return; all the more thankful and loving for the very barrenness and impotence of requital which made the gift a charity instead of an exchange. This license of implication, this inaccuracy of structure, which would include or involve a noun in its cognate verb (the words "loved more" being used as exactly equivalent to the words "felt more love"), is certainly not imitable by others, even if defensible in Shelley; but the change proposed in punctuation and construction makes the passage dissonant and tortuous, throws the sense out of keeping and the sound out of

tune.

In the eighth stanza of the third part the following line seems to me right as it stands—

"Leaf after leaf, day by day—"

if the weight and fall of the sound be properly given. Mr. Rossetti would slip in the word "and ;" were it there, I should rather wish to excise it.

In the twenty-second stanza of the "Adonais " I may remark that in Shelley's own Pisan edition the reading of the fourth line runs as it should, thus

"A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs."

I do not understand wherein can be the objection to the magic mantles" of the thirteenth stanza. It is the best word, the word most wanted to convey, by one such

light and great touch as only a great workman can give, the real office and rank of the divine "shepherds," to distinguish Apollo from the run of Admetus's herdsmen. The reading "tragic" would be by comparison insignificant, even were there any ground of proof or likelihood to sustain it. In the fourth stanza of this poem Shelley calls Milton "the third among the sons of light." It has been asked who were the two first: it has been objected that there were at least three-Homer, Dante, Shakespeare. I should be slow to doubt that Shelley had in view the first and the last names only. To him Dante could scarcely have seemed a type of spiritual illumination, a son of light elect above other poets; of this we might be sure without the evidence we have. No man, not even Landor, has laid upon the shrine of Dante a thankoffering of more delicate and passionate praise, has set a deeper brand of abhorrence upon the religion which stained his genius. Compare the twenty-second of Shelley's collected letters with the "Pentameron" of Landor-who has surely said enough, and said it with all the matchless force and charm of his most pure and perfect eloquence, in honour of Dante, to weigh against the bitterness of his blame. Had I the right or the strength to defend the name of one great man from the charge of another, to vindicate with all reverence the fame of Landor even against the verdict of Mazzini, I would appeal to all fellow-students whether Landor has indeed spoken as one "infirm in mind" or tainted with injustice as one slow of speech or dull of sense to appreciate the divine qualities of the founder of all modern poetry. He has exalted his name above wellnigh every

name on record, in the very work which taxes him with the infection of a ferocity caught from contact with the plague-sores of religion. It is now hoped and suggested that a spirit and a sense wholly unlike their outer habit may underlie the written words of Dante and of Milton.' That may be; but the outer habit remains, the most hateful creed in all history; uglier than the faith of Moloch or of Kali, by the hideous mansuetude, the devilish loving-kindness of its elections and damnations. Herein perhaps only do these two great poets fall below the greater, below Homer and Eschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare; the very skirts of whose thought, the very hems of whose garments, are clean from the pollution of this pestilence. Their words as well as their meanings, their sound not less than their sense, we can accept as wise and sweet, fruitful and fresh to all time; but the others have assumed the accent with the raiment of Dominic and Calvin-mighty men too, it may be, after their kind, but surely rather sons of fire than sons of light. At the same time it may be plausibly if not reasonably alleged that Shelley and Landor were both in some measure disqualified by their exquisite Hellenism of spirit to relish duly the tone and savour of Dante's imagination.

There are at least two passages in the "Ode to Liberty"

Of the poet of the English commonwealth Shelley has elsewhere said, "The sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican, and a bold inquirer into morals and religion;” a passage which may serve as comment on this of the "Adonais." On the other hand, Shelley in the " Defence of Poetry" does certainly place Dante, "the second epic poet," between Homer and Milton; and so far he would seem to be referred to here also as second "among the sons of light." But where then is Shakespeare, who surely had the most "light" in him of all?

where either the meaning or the reading is dubious and debateable. In the thirteenth stanza, having described, under the splendid symbol of a summons sent from Vesuvius to Etna across the volcanic islets of Stromboli (the "Æolian isles" of old), how Spain calls England, by example of revolution, to rivalry of resurrection (in 1820, be it observed), the poet bids the two nations, "twins of a single destiny," appeal to the years to come. So far all is plain sailing. Then we run upon what seems a sudden shoal or hidden reef. What does this mean?

"Impress us from a seal,

All ye have thought and done! Time cannot dare conceal.”

The construction is at once loose and intricate; the sentence indeed limps on both feet; but I am not sure. that here is not rather oversight than corruption. The sense at starting is clearly-"Impress us with all ye have thought or done, which time cannot dare conceal;" or, "Let all ye have thought and done impress us," and so forth. The construction runs wild and falls to pieces; we found and we must leave it patchwork; for no violence of alteration, were such permissible, could force it into coherence. When Shelley's grammar slips or trips, as it seems to do at times, the fault is a fault of hasty laxity, not of ignorance, of error, of defective sense or taste such as Byron's; venial at worst, not mortal.

We start our next question in the fifteenth stanza. Whose or what is "the impious name " so long and so closely veiled under the discreet and suggestive decency of asterisks? It was at once assumed and alleged to be the name of which Shelley had already said, through the