The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:—not so thou,
Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play—
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow—
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now."
I have copied out to the end of the stanza; for in fact it is not easy to stop the pen when copying such stanzas as these: but my business is with the fourth and fifth lines only. In the fourth line, as you will observe, a semicolon is inserted after the word "since." I find it there in the first edition of the fourth canto of Childe Harold, published in 1818; it is there in the standard edition of Lord Byron's Works, issued by Murray about 1832; it is there in the splendid illustrated edition of Childe Harold published by Murray in 1841,—one of the finest books of the kind, if not the finest, that has yet done honour to the English press. This punctuation is found, therefore, in the earliest edition that was issued, and in those on which the most care has been bestowed. Yet what is the sense which the lines thus punctuated present?
"Thy waters wasted them [i. e. the empires] while they were free,
And many a tyrant since."
They waters wasted many a tyrant? How, in the name of wonder? What sort of an occupation is this to assign to the majestic ocean? Does the poet mean to assert that anciently it wasted empires, and now it only wastes individuals. Absurd! Yet such is the only meaning, as far as I see, that can be assigned to the lines as they stand.
If the punctuation be altered, that is, if the semicolon after "since" be removed, and a comma placed at the end of the line, the whole becomes luminous: