Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/230

 ventured to retranslate in full, I never designed to supplant the text, but merely to elucidate. These small and slow labours of verbal criticism are the best returns we can make, the best tribute we can pay to a great man's work; and no man need think that a waste of his time, which so often employed the hours and the minds of Milton and of Landor. It is easier to dilate at length on the excellence of a man's genius than to sift and test it by proof of syllable and letter, that so the next student may at least find a clear ang certain text to study, without the trouble of deciphering a faded palimpsest or refitting a broken puzzle. And we have especial need of accuracy and fullness of text when the text is Shelley's. His mark is burnt in more deeply and more durably upon men's minds than that of any among the great poets of his day. Of these, Coleridge and Keats set no such mark on the spirit of their readers; they left simple and perfect examples of work absolutely faultless, visibly unsurpassable, self-resumed and self-content. Byron was first to stamp with his signet the thought and feeling of one kind of men; then Wordsworth in turn set his mark on a different kind. But the one for want of depth and sense and harmony, the other for want of heat and eyesight and lifeblood, and both for want of a truer force and a truer breadth of spirit, failed to impress upon all time any such abiding sign of their passage and their power, any such inevitable