Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/217

 not meant, for the "scorn" of Earth and her sons for Prometheus, of which he has lately complained, is not even in his eyes real; he says only that to refuse his request looks as though they scorned their saviour. But this new reading shows keen critical power and a quick-eyed ingenuity;

though it may be objected that the sentence preceding comes to an abrupt and feeble close with the close of the verse; and this I think is conclusive proof that the suggestion, however ingenious, must be decisively rejected. No conjectural emendation of a great poet's text is admissible which corrects a loose or faulty phrase by the substitution of one more accurate, but also more feeble and prosaic. When in the same act the Furies are described as

Blackening the air of night with countless wings, And hollow underneath like death,"

the critic would take the word "hollow" as an epithet of