III. EXTRACT FROM THE ADVERTISEMENTS AT THE END OF ROSALIND AND HELEN, &c. The REVOLT OF ISLAM; a Poem in the Stanza of Spenser, by PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.-8vo. 10s. 6d. "It is in the pourtraying of that passionate love, which had been woven from infancy in the hearts of Laon and Cythna, and which, binding together all their impulses in one hope and one struggle, had rendered them through life no more than two different tenements for the inhabitation of the same enthusiastic spirit ;—it is in the pourtraying of this intense, over-mastering, unfearing, unfading love, that Mr. Shelley has proved himself to be a genuine poet. Around his lovers, moreover, in the midst of all their fervours, he has shed an air of calm gracefulness, a certain majestic monumental stillness, which blends them harmoniously with the scene of their earthly existence, and realizes in them our ideas of Greeks struggling for freedom in the best spirit of their fathers. "Mr. Shelley's praise is, in our judgment, that of having poured over his narrative a very rare strength and abundance of poetic imagery and feeling,— of having steeped every word in the essence of his inspiration.” Review of the REVOLT OF ISLAM-BLACKWOOD'S ALASTOR; or the Spirit of Solitude, by the same Author. -Foolscap 8vo. 5s. HISTORY of a SIX WEEKS' TOUR through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland; with Letters descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni.-Foolscap 8vo. 5s. The advertisement of Alastor was repeated in Prometheus Unbound, showing that it was still offered for sale in the autumn of 1820.-H.B. F. IV. ON CERTAIN WORDS USED BY SHELLEY IN THE POEMS PRINTED IN THE PRESENT VOLUME, The textual notes in this volume threatened to cumber the poet's page so much and so often, that I thought it. well to reserve some remarks on certain words used herein, and embody them in an appendix. A long and close study of Shelley has convinced me that, like his brother poet Keats, he took fancies to words which he encountered in his various and extensive reading. I also think that he had an impulsive way of adopting certain unusual orthographies, either with or without good reasons, as the case might be, and that a change of orthography in a given word is not by any means as a matter of course attributable to a change of substitute in the revision of the press. No doubt we might, by minute study, and with sufficient basis of actual knowledge, strip the several volumes, as originally published, of various characteristics (in regard to orthography and punctuation) which belong to Shelley's substitutes in revision for the press, rather than to Shelley; but I see good reason to think that much of the variation in these minute details presented by the whole series of his mature works, from Alastor to Hellas, is to be laid to his own charge, if it involve any charge. I confess I have not made these minutia a study in the immature works preceding Alastor; but, in that and its successors, time spent in this way is not wasted, as it certainly brings one closer to the spirit of the works. At all events, wasted or not, here are some few notes resulting from the examination of these details; and I trust there may be some among my fellow-students whom they will interest.. D D Knarled. Shelley's adoption of this remarkable obsolete orthography (in Alastor, line 382, page 34, and line 530, page 39) is somewhat puzzling. That it is his word, and not his printer's, I have no doubt whatever, the Alastor volume being most carefully revised for the press, and the word being quite unlikely to occur to any one of the workmen of a Weybridge printer. I cannot see any reason for changing gnarled to knarled as a mere matter of preference to the eye; and, had Shelley not passed the Tweed, it would be difficult to account for this word as a part of his vocabulary. In Scotland, knarled, with the k separately pronounced, is common; and Scott, being in the daily habit of hearing the word so pronounced, naturally writes the old knarled oak." Shelley must, I think, have adopted the word on account of the strong expressiveness of the sound; for it certainly is not, to an English ear, musical. My friend Mr. A. H. Japp, better known by his nom de plume, "H. A. Page," suggests to me that the poet may have come in contact with some Scotch gardener or other dependent, and taken to some of his words; and I think this a probable enough hypothesis; but his two sojourns in Edinburgh with his first wife may have afforded him ample opportunity to catch up the word. Desart-Desert.-Shelley's procedure in regard to the orthography of the word desert is very curious. In Alastor, which, as I have said before, is a volume bearing every evidence of careful revision, the word is spelt in the orthodox way, desert; but in Mont Blanc, we have desart. In Laon and Cythna the word is as a rule spelt with an a; but there are some exceptions, all of which, I believe, are indicated in my notes. It is also spelt with an a in Rosalind and Helen (line 946, page 345), and in the Sonnet, Ozymandias, page 376. Now it is quite possible that the exceptions are the result of the different views of the compositors by whom the poem was set up, or of the poet's own failure to carry out without variation his own view of the way of spelling desert; but I am disposed to think that he had some such reason as I have indicated in the note at page 175, namely to make a distinction between the noun and the adjective. It is quite certain that he deliberately adopted the word desart; for it occurs in some of his most careful manuscripts; but I have not succeeded in finding, in mauuscript either desart where the word is unquestionably an adjective, or desert where it is a noun, although, among the instances I have noted in Laon and Cythna, will be found exceptions to the hypothetic rule of which I suspect the poet. It is interesting to note that, in all probability, he had been at the pains to convert Mrs. Shelley to his views on the orthography of this word; for in 1824, in reprinting Alastor with the Posthumous Poems, the word desert is changed to desart,-though any impression made on Mrs. Shelley by her husband in this respect would seem to have worn off with years, as she abandoned the word desart in 1839. In the cancelled passage of Mont Blanc given at page 78, and originally published in the Relics of Shelley, the word occurs in such a position that it might be either an adjective or a noun used adjectivially; and in the Relics, it is spelt with an e; but nothing can be founded on this, as my friend Mr. Garnett does not agree with me in my view of following Shelley's varying orthography implicitly where there is a fair presumption that it is his orthography. I have not been at the pains to search all dictionaries extant in Shelley's time for authorities; but I may say that Chatterton's friend Baily supports Shelley in numerous instances, and, what is much more significant, the only contemporary dictionary authority I have chanced upon for desart with an a is Boyer's French and English. Now this is remarkable, because the orthography in question occurs first, in the mature series of Shelley's works, in Mont Blanc, the genesis of which must have involved some study of French, and then, persistently, in Laon and Cythna, which could not have been written without considerable study of French literature. Two instances in which desert, unquestionably an adjective, is to be found with an e are at pages 175 and 230: one instance of desart with an a, when presumably an adjective, is at page 262, line 1. Etherial-Etherial-Ethereal.-The spelling adopted for this word in Alastor is etherial: see line 352 and footnote, page 33. Throughout Laon and Cythna it is spelt atherial: see Canto I, stanza XLVIII, page 125; and I do not think there is any room for doubting that the printed book in each case fulfils the intention of the poet in regard to the spelling of this particular word. In Rosalind and Helen the more usual orthography ethereal is adopted: see line 1060, page 349; but that book is less authoritative than either of the others in such details, not having been revised by Shelley. Assuming, therefore, that the change made in Laon and Cythna was deliberate, we must seek a reason; and we may find one in connexion with the copious renewal of Greek studies in 1817, indicated by the list of books read by Shelley and Mary in that year, printed at pages 88 and 89 of the Shelley Memorials. The reason surmised is of course a sound etymological one, -approximating the word as it does to the Greek original ailńp whence it derives. This strikes me as an unmistakeable sign that Shelley really thought about his words, as words,—fitfully it may be, but still to some result; and we ought to give his text the benefit of such result, when there is any benefit. This particular change of orthography, I value more on account of its bearings on other words than for itself. For example, the word ecstasy in Shelley's editions is sometimes spelt ecstacy and sometimes extacy, two almost equally vicious modes of spelling it, much in vogue in Shelley's day; and as it is inconceivable that he could have meant to adopt both modes in one poem, I see |
