"The poet, I suspect, wrote 'A sister sanctified, &c.'" MALONE. P. 682. (10) "Paling the place which did no form receive," &c. So Malone; and ingeniously enough.-The quarto has "Playing the Place," &c., an error occasioned by the "Playing" of the next line.-Mr. W. N. Lettsom proposes "Salving the place which did no harm receive," &c.: but that "form" is the genuine reading has been proved, I think, by Steevens. (The second of these errors is corrected in ed. 1640.) P. 682. (12) "a sacred nun, Who, disciplin'd, ay, dieted in grace, Believ'd her eyes when they to assail begun,” &c. The quarto has "a sacred Sunne," &c.-the compositor's eye having perhaps caught the initial letter of the preceding word; and though shown to be an error, not only by the context, but by the fourth stanza above, "Lo, this device was sent me from a nun, Or [A ?] sister sanctified, of holiest note,” &c.,— it has been defended by Malone on the strength of an expression in Henry VIII., "Those suns of glory, those two lights of men," &c., and by Steevens, who observes that in Coriolanus the chaste Valeria is called "the moon of Rome,"―passages not at all parallel to the present one.-As to the third line, "Believ'd her eyes when they to assail begun,”-its correctness need not be questioned: compare, p. 677, "Each eye that saw him did enchant the mind." P. 683. (13) "Love's arms are peace, 'gainst rule, 'gainst sense, 'gainst shame ; Manifestly corrupted: but the right reading is not so easily determined.— "Love aims at peace Yet sweetens," &c. Mr. W. N. Lettsom, "Love charms our peace," &c.; and my own conjecture is "Love arms our peace," &c. (In Macbeth, act iii. sc. 2, we find, "Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace," &c.) P. 683. (14) "Who glaz'd with crystal gate the glowing roses That flame through water which their hue encloses." So the lines are pointed in the quarto, except that it has a comma after "roses :" and I now regret that, not having collated the quarto when I first published Shakespeare's Poems, I allowed this passage to stand with the punctuation of Malone, “Who, glaz'd with crystal, gate the glowing roses That flame," &c. (There is something like the above in Byron's Childe Harold, c. iv. 28,— "gently flows The deep-dy'd Brenta, where their hues instil The odorous purple of a new-born rose, Which streams upon her stream, and glass'd within it glows," &c.) "O cleft effect," &c. P. 683. (15) The quarto has "Or cleft," &c. P. 684. (16) "Or swooning paleness," &c. Here the quarto has " Or sounding paleness," &c.; and in the last line of this stanza "sound at tragick showes.” See vol. v. p. 88, note (67). |