Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/225

 translates "Get along;" it should rather be "Come," as the shout is not meant to scare, but to reclaim) the song continues—a literal goat-song for once:—

Ease your udders milk-distent, Take the young ones to the teat, Left in yeanlings' penfolds pent; Now the sleepy midday bleat Of your sucklings calls you home; Come to fold then, will you? come From the full-flowered pasture-grasses Up in Ætna's rock-strewn passes.

Here no Bacchus, no dance comes Here, nor Mænads thyrse-bearing, Nor glad clang of kettledrums, Nor by well or running spring Drops of pale bright wine; nor now With the nymphs on Nysa's brow An Iacchic melody To the golden Aphrodite Do I lift," &c.

Read do for will, which stands in Shelley's text through mere misreading of the passage; it was doubtless wrongly pointed in the copy by which he worked.

There is another omission after verse 165, more accountable than this; whether any part of Shelley's version was struck out or not in the printing we have not been told. Perhaps the passage, essential as it is to the continuity of the scene, may be borne with in this reduced and softened form. After the verse—"I would give All that the Cyclops feed upon their mountains,"—add:

And pitch into the brine off some white cliff, Having got once well drunk and cleared my brows.