Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/218

 the wings, "with wings countless and hollow;" wrongly, as I think. These Furies of Shelley are "phantasms," hollow and shadowy emanations of "the all-miscreative brain:" quædam simulacra modis pallentia miris.

The difficult passage at the end of the third act I can only explain by some such paraphrase as this: "the thrones, altars, and prisons of the past were now like those barbaric and monumental figures carved or engraved on obelisks, which survive the decay of later structures raised by their conquerors, tombs and prisons built by kings of a dynasty more recent than the race which had reared them; these they see mouldering round them, built since their date in honour of the religion and the pride of past kings and priests, and are themselves now merely looked on as wonders;" thus only, and awkwardly, can I make anything of the involved and long-drawn sentence, unless with Mr. Rossetti we put a full period after the words "mouldering round," and start afresh in this fashion; "those monuments imaged (i.e., did image; but I take imaged to be the participle) a dark faith, to the satisfaction and pride of kings and priests and are now but an astonishment." This again seems to me inadmissible: I fear the passage must be left more or less in confusion, the parenthesis being so long between the two main verbs which prop the sentence ("which look forth and are now," &c.); but in fact these large and stately structures of massive and majestic verse do seem too often to need more help of clamps and girders, if the main stones and joists of the fabric are to hold together.

At the close of that transcendant interlude of antiphonal music in the fourth act, the Earth takes up and