and a half for the passage which was detached under the title of Superstition and published with Alastor, but no further change; and the seventh is intact. The eighth and ninth sections contain the important revisions and interpolations for the Second Part of The Damon of the World, printed in the present volume; and there are also alterations in passages that were after all rejected from the revised poem: these will appear in variorum notes to Queen Mab in the next volume. The only remaining peculiarity of this copy of Queen Mab is a sum done in pencil on the fly-title to the Notes; but even so small a matter as a sum in simple multiplication may be psychologically interesting. The one in question is a multiplication of 122 by 21; and the correct result is duly arrived at. Shelley evidently wanted to know about how many thousand lines Queen Mab consisted of; and his method of approaching that knowledge was characteristically inexact. The poem ends on page 122: the full page contains 22 lines: a page with one space before a new paragraph contains 21 lines; and Shelley would seem to have accepted that as the average, leaving out of consideration the eighteen opening and concluding pages, four entirely blank pages occurring when the section chances to end on a right-hand page, and the numerous instances in which the number of lines in a page is reduced. considerably below 21 by multiplication of spaces. It is also worth recording, as characteristic of another mental trait of Shelley, that one of the rude sketches, mentioned as being on the cover of the book, represents a pool of tranquil water surrounded by rocks,-a good haunt wherein to write poetry and sail fleets of paper boats. 1 See Vol. I, p. 56, of this edition. H. B. F. V. SONNETS BY LEIGH HUNT, KEATS, AND HORACE SMITH. THE NILE. BY LEIGH HUNT. Ir flows through old hush'd Egypt and its sands, That roam'd through the young earth, the glory extreme The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands. Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong, As of a world left empty of its throng, TO THE NILE. BY KEATS. SON of the old moon-mountains African! Nurse of swart nations since the world began, O may dark fancies err! They surely do; ON A STUPENDOUS LEG OF GRANITE, DISCOVERED STANDING BY ITSELF IN THE DESERTS OF EGYPT, WITH THE INSCRIPTION INSERTED BELOW. BY HORACE SMITH. IN Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, We wonder, and some hunter may express Once dwelt in that annihilated place. VI. ON CERTAIN WORDS USED BY SHELLEY IN THE POEMS PRINTED IN THE PRESENT VOLUME. FOLLOWING Out the plan adopted in the first and second volumes of this edition, I have reserved a few notes on words and orthography for this appendix. The bearings of the special department of word-study are, in the meantime, somewhat altered, because, while the first and second volumes are confined to the reproduction of works printed in Shelley's life-time, the present volume contains only two important works in this category, Adonais and Hellas, -the remainder, with one or two minor exceptions, such as the Lines Written on Hearing the News of the Death of Napoleon, being posthumous. In regard to these last we have to take into account Mrs. Shelley's idiosyncrasies; and the fact that a peculiar orthography occurs in one of the posthumous poems is by no means proof positive that it was Shelley's orthography. Knarled. This word comes before us again in The Witch of Atlas (Stanza XXII, page 252). I have not noted it in any poem intermediate between Alastor and that; and in this case it is found, not in any of the printed editions, but in the transcript in Mrs. Shelley's writing preserved among the papers of Leigh Hunt. Bearing in mind the probability that Mrs. Shelley followed Shelley in some of these peculiarities, I think this occurrence of the orthography knarled is most likely attributable, as suggested in the Appendix to the first volume, to a preference established in Shelley's mind for the strongly-sounded k which marks the Scotch pronunciation of this word. Desart-Desert.-In going through the contents of this volume I have not found any good reason for abandoning the supposition that the object of this varying orthography was to distinguish desart, noun, from desert, adjective. The evidence of Hellas does not go for much, because, as shewn in the note at page 36, the first edition is full of minute inconsistencies. We find, however, desert, noun, in line 1008 (page 90), although the word is spelt Desart in line 91 (page 50). In the volume of Posthumous Poems, in which, it will be remembered, Mrs. Shelley changed desert to desart in reprinting Alastor,-we find desart used as an adjective also, namely in The Triumph of Life. The term desert Labrador (line 407, page 347) must surely mean deserted, desolate Labrador. Mrs. Shelley gives it in the Posthumous Poems as desart; but I suspect this was because, in adopting Shelley's orthography for the word, she had not fully appreciated his reason for it. Falshood. In the revised copy of Queen Mab from which the Second Part of The Damon of the World is given in the present volume, I find the word falshood written in one of the manuscript emendations; and that orthography seems to have been adopted throughout Queen Mab; but the occurrence of the preferable orthography frequently in the later volumes issued in Shelley's life-time leads me to adhere to the opinion expressed in the Appendix to the first Volume, that to write falshood instead of falsehood, was a writer's weakness of Shelley's. Perhaps he spelt the word thus as a boy, and never wholly got out of the habit. At all events we find it so spelt in Julian and Maddalo, where also we find others of Shelley's well-known writer's errors, such as thier for their, deciets for deceits, dissappointment for disappointment. We also find mein for mien in the same careful manuscript. See list of peculiarities of this manuscript, at page 106. Tyger. This orthography occurs in Mrs. Shelley's transcript |