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, Stands a gigantic leg, which far off throws 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 apeculiar 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 of The Witch of Atlas, stanza LI; but not in any of the printed editions. Instances of this spelling are noted in A Vision of the Sea, on the peculiarities of which, notes will be found at pages 281 and 282 of Vol. II. The fact that the word tiger is generally spelt in Shelley's editions in the orthodox way, and that it occurs in The Witch of Atlas in Mrs. Shelley's writing, might favour the supposition that the peculiarities of A Vision of the Sea arose from its being printed from a transcript of hers,-a very likely thing to have happened. Tartarian.-In Laon and Cythna, Canto VI, Stanza XIX, this adjective is so used that it might possibly be held to mean of Tartarus,-though the opinion was expressed in Vol. I, page 205, that it meant of Tartary. The occurrence of the word in line 838 of Hellas (page 83 of this volume) leaves, it seems to me, hardly any doubt on this point. Mahomet is described as spurring "a Tartarian barb into the Gap" in the wall of Stamboul; and here, at all events, there can be no question between Tartar and Hellish as the meaning of Tartarian. Brere. This word brere for briar, which occurs in the eighteenth stanza of Adonais (page 16), is one of several old English words with which Shelley occasionally ornamented his poems, up to the end of his career. It is to be observed that in this case the word is convenient as a rhyme to bier, varies but slightly from its modern equivalent, and is very euphonious. Shelley may, with equal probability, be supposed to have got it from Chaucer or from some later writer,-though there is more direct evidence of familiarity with Spenser than with any other early writers but Shakespeare and Milton. Treen. The obsolete plural treen occurs in a cancelled passage of Adonais, printed at page 32 of this volume, and in The Woodman and the Nightingale, at page 419. These, again, are cases in which it serves for a rhyme. Shelley seems to me to have been at that time somewhat more chary than formerly of using old words that might be thought affected; and it is possible that this particular plural may have had something to do with the rejection of the exquisite unfinished stanza in which it occurs. Swink.-Professor Baynes (Edinburgh Review, April, 1871) says that this obsolete word together with eyen, treen, and others, "though not peculiar to Spenser, were probably derived from him." This particular word occurs in the Letter to Maria Gisborne (line 59, page 229); and in the same poem (lines 103 and 104) we have the distinctly Spenserian reference, I'll leave, as Spenser says, with many mo, This secret in the pregnant womb of time,... I think this almost amounts to proof that it was from Spenser that Shelley adopted the neighbouring word swink. I wis—I wist.—I presume these expressions may also be safely put down to the influence of Spenser. I wist is in the Letter to Maria Gisborne (line 15, page 228), and I wis in The Witch of Atlas (stanza LXXV, page 270). The only difference between the use made of the one and that made of the other is that I wist is made to rhyme with mechanist, I wis with Amasis: both forms are used as the first person singular of the present tense; so that from whatever source Shelley may have derived the quaint verb to wis, he does not seem to have looked very curiously into its inflections. Perhaps the use of the past tense in that notable speech of Christ, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" may have fixed the sense wrongly in Shelley's mind at an early age. In that passage, wist might easily be mistaken for an equivalent for know, instead of knew; and the liability to such a change of tense in the mind is not lessened by the context, "How is it that ye sought me ?" It is worthy of remark that in both instances, the word is used |