“And though he sees it full of wounds,
Cruel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34.)
Here the original reads, “Cruel still on,” and the only correction needed was a comma after “cruel.”
“And by the glorious light
Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft,
Only the jelly’s left.” (p. 41.)
The original has “of which,” and rightly, for “their spheres bereft” is parenthetic, and the sense is “of which only the jelly’s left.” Lovelace is speaking of the eyes of a mistress who has grown old, and his image, confused as it is, is based on the belief that stars shooting from their spheres fell to the earth as jellies,—a belief, by the way, still to be met with in New England.
Lovelace, describing a cow (and it is one of the few pretty passages in the volume), says,—
“She was the largest, goodliest beast
That ever mead or altar blest,
Round as her udder, and more white
Than is the Milky-Way in night.” (p. 64.)
Mr. Hazlitt changes to “Round was her udder,” thus making that white instead of the cow, as Lovelace intended. On the next page we read,—
“She takes her leave o’ th’ mournful neat,
Who, by her toucht, now prizeth her life,
Worthy alone the hollowed knife.”
Compare Chapman (Iliads, xviii. 480):—
“Slew all their white fleec’d sheep and neat.”