where the sea-wind that first waved the wet hair of Venus moves now only the ripples that remember her rising limbs; where the Muses are, and their mother. There is his place, who in such a place long since found Circe feasting and heard Apollo play; there, below the upper glens and wellsprings of the Centaurs, above the scooped sea-shelves and flushing sands of the Sirens. Whatever now he say or do, he has been and will remain to us a lover and a giver of light; unwittingly, by impulse, for pure love of it; and such lead further and lighten otherwise than they know. All conscious help or guidance serves us less than unconscious leadership. In his best words there is often a craft and a charm ; but in his best work there is always rest, and air, and a high relief; it satisfies, enlarges, refreshes with its cool full breath and serenity. On some men's nerves the temperature strikes somewhat cold; there are lungs that cannot breathe but in the air of a hothouse or a hospital. There is not much indeed of heat or flame in the Vestal or lunar light that shines from this hearth; but it does not burn down. poetry is a pure temple, a white flower of marble, unfretted without by intricate and grotesque traceries, unvexed within by fumes of shaken censers or intoning of hoarse choristers; large and clear and cool, with many chapels in it and outer courts, full of quiet and of music. In the plainest air played here there is a sound of sincerity and skill; as in one little Requiescat, which without show of beauty or any thought or fancy leaves long upon the ear an impressure of simple, of earnest, of weary melody, wound up into a sense of rest. We do not always want to bathe our spirit in overflowing waters or flaming fires of

His

imagination; pathos and passion and aspiration and desire are not the only springs we seek for song. Sorrows and joys of thought or sense meet us here in white raiment and wearing maiden crowns. In each court or chapel there is a fresh fragrance of early mountain flowers which bring with them the wind and the sun and a sense of space and growth, all of them born in high places, washed and waved by upper airs and rains. Into each alike there falls on us as we turn a conscience of calm beauty, of cool and noble repose, of majestic work under melodious and lofty laws; we feel and accept the quiet sovereignties of happy harmony and loyal form, whose service for the artist is perfect freedom: it is good for us to be here. Nor are all these either of modern structure or of Greek ; here is an Asiatic court, a Scandinavian there. And everywhere is the one ruling and royal quality of classic work, an assured and equal excellence of touch. Whether for Balder dead and the weeping gods in Asgard, or for the thought-sick heart-sore king of a weary land far east, blinded and vexed in spirit with the piteous pains and wrongs of other men, the same good care and wise charm of right words are used to give speed of wing and sureness of foot to the ministering verse. The stormy northern world of water and air and iron and snow, the mystic oppression of eastern light and cruel colour in fiery continents and cities full of sickness and splendour and troubled tyrannies, alike yield up to him their spirit and their secret, to be rendered again in just and full expression. These are the trophies of his work and the gifts of his hand; through these and such as these things, his high and distinct seat is assured to him among English poets.

184

NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.

[1869.]

IT is seldom that the work of a scholiast is so soon wanted as in Shelley's case it has been. The first collected edition of his works had many gaps and errors patent and palpable to any serious reader. His text is already matter for debate and comment, as though he were a classic newly unearthed. Certain passages begin to be famous as crucial subjects for emendation; and the master-singer of our modern poets shares with his own masters and models the least enviable proof of fame— that given by corrupt readings and diverse commentaries. Awaiting the appearance, now long looked for, of a surer and carefuller text, I have but a word to say in passing, a hand to lend in this humble service of verbal emendation. One poet only of late times, and that but once, has suffered more than Shelley from the negligence and dullness of those to whose hands the trust of his text was committed. The last relics of Landor came before us distorted and deformed in every page by this shameful neglect; and the value is thus impaired of some among the most precious and wonderful examples extant of great genius untouched by great age, full of the grace, the

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