he afterwards altered it to—
"The mind of music breathing in her face."
But, this not satisfying him, the next step of correction brought the line to what it is at present—
"The mind, the music breathing from her face."[107]
But the longest, as well as most splendid, of those passages, with which the perusal of his own strains, during revision, inspired him, was that rich flow of eloquent feeling which follows the couplet,—"Thou, my Zuleika, share and bless my bark," &c.—a strain of poetry, which, for energy and tenderness of thought, for music of versification, and selectness of diction, has, throughout the greater portion of it, but few rivals in either ancient or modern song. All this passage was sent, in successive scraps, to the printer,—correction following correction, and thought reinforced by thought. We have here, too, another example of that retouching process by which some of his most exquisite effects were attained. Every reader remembers the four beautiful lines—
"Or, since that hope denied in worlds of strife,
Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life!
The evening beam that smiles the clouds away,
And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!"
In the first copy of this passage sent to the publisher, the last line was written thus—
{an airy}
"And tints to-morrow with a {fancied} ray"—