Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/221

 The first English edition alone reads (I. 1)—

All others, from the Livornese onward, have let fall the word me. These slight things, so tedious to dwell upon, all help us—and they only can help us—towards a true text of our greatest modern poet. In the case of Æschylus or of Shakespeare, such light crumbs and dry husks would be held precious as grains of gold. I have but a few more to glean and reserve or reject as they seem worth.

I would certainly not agree to alter without authority that admirable verse in the fragment on Leonardo's "Medusa;"

the intense effect of sound and accent is too rare a thing to lose or change. To shift the stress of a verse and elongate an elided syllable must prove either a triumph of musical instinct or a dissonant and hateful failure. Here the triumphant skill and subtle sense of Shelley's ear for metre give special charm to the delicate daring of his verse, which would be lost were we to read "the far lands," even did this not make the line otherwise immetrical. In some other cases cited by Mr. Rossetti there may be room and reason for cutting out or slipping in a syllable or so. His corrections of text in the imperfect "Triumph of Life" seem to me worthy of all grateful acceptance: but the suggestion of "mouthless" for "monthless," in the fragment of a stanza rejected from the "Adonais," is somewhat grotesque. "Time's monthless torrent," if these were indeed Shelley's deliberate words, must mean the eternal course of time without end