Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/246

 his whole heart. A much more real and grave solecism in "Julian and Maddalo" has been left not only uncorrected but unnoticed—"One blessing which thou ne'er didst imprecate for on me." Even such a positive blunder as this I should not myself have presumed to correct by any process of suppression and substitution; but it is singular that an editor who has never scrupled to apply this process when he thought fit should have abstained from applying it in this really flagrant instance of bad English. Against another example of this interference I must also protest for the sake of my own and all ears that have been trained on the music of Shelley; I refer to the change made in the last verses of the overture to the "Lines written among the Euganean Hills." If the editor finds the license of such a phrase as

Every little living nerve Are like sapless leaflets now"

too "annoying" to be endured by a scholastic sense of propriety, the annoyance is far keener which will be inflicted on others by his substituted reading—"Is like a sapless leaflet now." Here again Shelley has indulged in a loose and obsolete construction which may or may not be defensible; I should not at the present day permit it to myself, or condone it in another; and had the editor been engaged in the revision of a schoolboy's theme, he would certainly have done right to correct such a phrase, and as certainly would not have done wrong to add such further correction as he might deem desirable; but the task here undertaken is not exactly comparable