And the leaves, brown, yellow, and grey, and red, 35 And the gusty winds waked the winged seeds, Till they clung round many a sweet flower's stem, 40 The water-blooms under the rivulet Fell from the stalks on which they were set; Then the rain came down, and the broken stalks, And the leafless net-work of parasite bowers Between the time of the wind and the snow, All loathliest weeds began to grow, 45 50 Whose coarse leaves were splashed with many a speck, Like the water-snake's belly and the toad's back.1 tion whether Mr. Swinburne's instinct is not correct,-whether this emendation of Mrs. Shelley's was not one for which she had the authority of Shelley's list of errata; and it is certainly worth while to compare the line, as printed by her, with two similar lines in Rosalind and Helen: But day by day, week after week It will be noted that the repetition of the same preposition in each half of the line is expressly avoided in both those instances, although there is not in either of them the shortness of a syllable that induced Mr. Rossetti to want to "slip in and" in the line of The Sensitive Plant. 1 Mr. Rossetti substituted a semicolon for a full-stop at the end of this stanza, and a semi-colon for a comma at henbane in the next, so as to connect thistles, nettles, darnels, dock, and henbane, with began to grow, and leave hemlock to do the work of stifling the air by itself. He says "Its' cannot be allowed to do duty for 'thistles, nettles, darnels,' &c., &c., And thistles, and nettles, and darnels rank, And stifled the air till the dead wind stank. And plants, at whose names the verse feels loath, Filled the place with a monstrous undergrowth, Prickly, and pulpous, and blistering, and blue, Livid, and starred with a lurid dew. And agarics, and fungi, with mildew and mould. Started like mist from the wet ground cold; Pale, fleshy, as if the decaying dead 55 60 With a spirit of growth had been animated! 65 Their moss rotted off them, flake by flake, Till the thick stalk stuck like a murderer's stake, Where rags of loose flesh yet tremble on high, Infecting the winds that wander by.1 though possibly the solecism is Shelley's own." But it seems to me that it can and must be allowed, if Shelley meant it so; and I have no doubt that he did mean the two stanzas to stand as they are printed in his edition, as given above. The construction is not what we would teach at school; but the sense is doubtless that thistles, nettles, darnels, dock, henbane, and hemlock combined to stifle the air, and that hemlock also stretched out its long and hollow shank. 1 It is very doubtful whether this stanza should remain in the text; but the present evidence against it is hardly sufficient to warrant me in removing it to a station at the foot of the page among variorum readings. The evidence is simply its omission by Mrs. Shelley from her first edition of 1839 and all subsequent editions. It may have been dropped out by accident; or it may have been cancelled by Mrs. Shelley on her own authority; or Shelley may, on consideration, have thought it better to omit it, and in that case he would provide for its omission in his list of errata, which would be the authority of his widow for leaving it out. I confess I lean towards this hypothesis; and it may be profitably borne in mind that Shelley must have been well aware of a precisely similar omission from The Ancient Mariner, one of his favourite poems. In reprinting that in Sibylline Leaves in 1817, Coleridge omitted one very ghastly stanza; and, in a list of errata, gave directions for the cancelling of another; and this process was likely enough to have suggested to Shelley the withdrawal of what, to his keen artistic sense, might well seem to him over horrible when he saw it in print for the first time. Spawn, weeds, and filth, a leprous scum, Dammed it up with roots knotted like water snakes. And hour by hour, when the air was still, And unctuous meteors from spray to spray The Sensitive Plant like one forbid For the leaves soon fell, and the branches soon For Winter came: the wind was his whip: And they clanked at his girdle like manacles; His breath was a chain which without a sound Then the weeds which were forms of living death And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant First there came down a thawing rain And its dull drops froze on the boughs again, Then there steamed up a freezing dew Which to the drops of the thaw-rain grew; And a northern whirlwind, wandering about Like a wolf that had smelt a dead child out, : Shook the boughs thus laden, and heavy and stiff, And snapped them off with his rigid griff. When winter had gone and spring came back 100 105 110 The Sensitive Plant was a leafless wreck; 115 But the mandrakes, and toadstools, and docks, and darnels, Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels. CONCLUSION. Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that 5 10 15 Whether that lady's gentle mind, No longer with the form combined I dare not guess; but in this life Of error, ignorance, and strife, It is a modest creed, and yet To own that death itself must be, That garden sweet, that lady fair, 'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed; not they. For love, and beauty, and delight, 1 In Shelley's edition, pass'd, instead of the usual past. 23 |