Shelley. In the editions the two vowel-sounds are confounded under the one spelling, ‘leapt.’ In a few cases Shelley’s spelling, though unusual or obsolete, has been retained. Thus in ‘aethereal,’ ‘paean,’ and one or two more words the ae will be found, and ‘airy’ still appears as ‘aëry.’ Shelley seems to have uniformly written ‘lightening’: here the word is so printed whenever it is employed as a trisyllable; elsewhere the ordinary spelling has been adopted.[1]
The editor of Shelley to-day enters upon a goodly heritage, the accumulated gains of a series of distinguished predecessors. Mrs. Shelley’s two editions of 1839 form the nucleus of the present volume, and her notes are here reprinted in full; but the arrangement of the poems differs to some extent from that followed by her—chiefly in respect of Queen Mab, which is here placed at the head of the Juvenilia, instead of at the forefront of the poems of Shelley’s maturity. In 1862 a slender volume of poems and fragments, entitled Relics of Shelley, was published by Dr. Richard Garnett, C.B.—a precious sheaf gleaned from the MSS. preserved at Boscombe Manor. The Relics constitute a salvage second only in value to the Posthumous Poems of 1824. To the growing mass of Shelley’s verse yet more material was added in 1870 by Mr. William Michael Rossetti, who edited for Moxon the Complete Poetical Works published in that year. To him we owe in particular a revised and greatly enlarged version of the fragmentary drama of Charles I. But though not seldom successful in restoring the text, Mr. Rossetti pushed revision beyond the bounds of prudence, freely correcting grammatical errors, rectifying small inconsistencies in the sense, and too lightly adopting conjectural emendations on the grounds of rhyme or metre. In the course of an article published in the Westminster Review for July, 1870, Miss Mathilde Blind, with the aid of material furnished by Dr. Garnett, ‘was enabled,’ in the words of Mr. Buxton Forman, ‘to supply omissions, make authoritative emendations, and controvert erroneous changes’ in Mr. Rossetti’s work; and in the more cautiously
- ↑ Not a little has been written about ‘uprest’ (Revolt of Islam, III. xxi. 5), which has been described as a nonce-word deliberately coined by Shelley ‘on no better warrant than the exigency of the rhyme.’ There can be little doubt that ‘uprest’ is simply an overlooked misprint for ‘uprist’—not by any means a nonce-word, but a genuine English verbal substantive of regular formation, familiar to many from its employment by Chaucer. True, the corresponding rhyme-words in the passage above referred to are ‘nest,’ ‘possessed,’ ‘breast’; but a laxity such as ‘nest’—‘uprist’ is quite in Shelley’s manner. Thus in this very poem we find ‘midst’—‘shed’st’ (VI. xvi), ‘mist’—‘rest’—‘blest’ (V. lviii), ‘loveliest’— ‘mist’—‘kissed’—‘dressed' (V. xliii). Shelley may have first seen the word in The Ancient Mariner; but he employs it more correctly than Coleridge, who seems to have mistaken it for a preterite-form ( = ‘uprose’), whereas in truth it serves either as the third person singular of the present ( = ‘upriseth’), or, as here, for the verbal substantive( = ‘uprising’).
