Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/224

 construed. Shelley has not distinguished the drinking-can or cup wrought of ivy-wood, or carved round with ivy-leaves, from the ninety-gallon bowl  into which the Cyclops had just milked his cows. Read:—

"Then he milked the cows, And, pouring in the white milk, filled a bowl That might have held ten amphoræ; and by it He set himself an ivy-carven cup— Three cubits wide and four in depth it seemed— [And set a brass pot on the fire to boil] And spits made out of blackthorn shoots, with tips Burnt hard in fire, and planed in the other parts Smooth with a pruning-hook; and huge blood-bowls Ætnæan, set for the axe's edge to fill."

Or if can mean the axes themselves, and  be read for ;

"And the under-jaws Of axes, huge Ætnæan slaughtering-tools."

I do not see the meaning of those asterisks marking omission where omission is none, between the opening speech of Silenus and the parode. Of this Shelley has only translated the strophe and the latter part of the epode. Why the intervening verses were omitted it is impossible to say. In default of the better version he has begrudged us I offer this by way of makeshift, following the exact order and cadence of rhymes observed by Shelley. After the call to the she-goat (which he