Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/204

 "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—

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—

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