Oct. 25. 1851.] 



NOTES AND QUEEIES. 



325 



of the line, but in default of anything better I will 

 venture to suggest that his lordship may have 

 written, or intended to write, the word pray as (he 

 concluding word of the stanza. The sense, witli 

 pray instead of lay, would not, in my judgment, 

 be inferior to that of the line in its present form ; 

 nor would it be in itself inappropriate, as allusion 

 has just been made to man being sent "howling 

 to his gods ;" and, at all events, by the adoption of 

 pray, an almost unpardonable graumiatical error is 

 avoided. Pkiscian. 



I cannot agree with T. W. as to the stanza 

 quoted from the Hymn to the Ocean. 



" Thy waters wasted thorn while they were free. 

 And many a tyrant since" (has wasted them), 



is very good sense, and much more Byronic than 

 the cacophonous inversion T. AV. proposes. 



SlachvoocFs criticism of this hymn (probably by 

 the Professor) is not at all too severe. Noble as 

 are some parts of it, it is full of cockneyisms and 

 platitudes. What can be worse than 

 " There let hira lai/." 



Again : 



" Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll !" 

 is most magnificent in its sonorous march : but 

 the nest line is equally absurd : 



" Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain!" 



In vain ! Why, did not Columbus discover a 

 world ? Did not Nelson make England's fiime 

 eternal ? Do not our tea, coffee, wine, and cotton 

 cross the surging seas? 



As to the " Gladiator " stanza, nobody can doubt 

 that rushed is the right and most poetic reading. 

 Hush is a strong word: gush a weak one, much 

 liackneyed by neoteric poetasters. Byron never 

 used n'MsA in such a sense. Thoughts Aonotgtish, 

 thougli blood and water may. I therefore venture 

 to differ from T. W. and his two illustrious friends. 



SIORTIMER CoLilNS. 



The difficiiUy which your correspondent T. W. 

 finds in Lord Byron's celebrated Address to the 

 Ocean is occasioned by his having taken up a 

 wrong notion of the construction at the first read- 

 ing ; and the solution of his perplexity is so ob- 

 vious, when this is (mce pointed out, that it must 

 have already occurred to many of vour readers, 

 and very probably, by this time, to T. W. himself. 

 The lines that puzzle him are — 



" Thy waters wasted them while they were free, 

 And many a tyrant since ; their shores obey 

 The stranger, slave, or savage." 



"What!" exclaims T. AV., "The waters v/asted 

 many a tyrant ? How, in the name of wonder ?" 

 How, indeed ! Probably more readers at once 

 caugiit the sense : — 



" Thy waters wasted tlicin while they were free 

 And many a tyrant since — hns wastuU t/u-/n." 



The word "wasted" is used in a somewhat dif- 

 ferent sense in the two cases, but this is the price 

 of the antithesis; and the result follows, that 

 their shores now obey the stranger, the slave, or 

 the savage, as exemplified in Greece, Asia, and 

 Africa respectively. And here we may observe, 

 (hat the writer in Blackwood's Magazine, whom 

 T. W. quotes, and who thinks the ocean appealed 

 to is the world's ocean, and not the ilediterranean, 

 has been just as blind to the train of thought in 

 the other part as T. AV. in this. 



But in the way of doing something beyond the 

 solution of this ])articular obscurity, so far as there 

 is any, I would remark, tliat Byron's efforts at 

 concentration and point not unfrequently give 

 rise to an obscurity of this kind ; which for a 

 moment produces a perplexity, that seems laugh- 

 able as soon as the true sense occurs to us. For 

 instance, on first reading these verses in the 

 Corsair, — 



" Be the edge sharpen'd of my boarding-brand. 

 And give its guard more room to fix my hand. 

 This let the armourer with speed dispose; 

 Last time, it more fatigued my arm than foes : " 



I exclaimed, like T. W., "What! his sword 

 fatigued his foes ? What a most absurd expres- 

 sion ! To be sure, one may imagine that when 

 Conrad was killing his enemies one after another 

 withimt stopping, they would say. What a tiresome 

 man he is ! but this does not seem to be in the 

 vein of the narration." And then, reading the 

 passage again, and considering that the pirate 

 complains of the guard of his sword being too 

 narrow, I saw plainly ihat, with whatever damage 

 to the rhythm, the verse was to be read — 



'■ Last time, it more fatigued my arm ^\\an foes" (did). 



]\Iy sword, by its not fitting to my hand, fatigued 

 my arm more than all the resistance that foes 

 could offer. 



I will give another example of the same kind, 

 again taken from the Pirate. In the enthusiastic 

 description of a ship, he says : 



" Who would not brave the battle-fire — the wreck — 

 To inovc the monarch of her peopled deck? " 



" Who?" I exclaimed; "but who wants to 

 move him ? This monarch is, I suppose, the cap- 

 tain ; but why should men in general wish to 

 move him?" I suppose most of your readers see 

 at the first what I saw at the second glance, that 

 Byron meant " to move as the monarch of this 

 deck," that is, to be the captain. 



If I have satisfied T. AV. and the rest of your 

 readers of the construction of the first passage, I 

 Iiave, I think, also shown that the tendency to 

 such transient mistakes in reading Byron is not 

 uncommon. W. AV. 



Cambridge, Oct. 10. 18.51. 



