ON A CELEBRATED PASSAGE IN "ROMEO AND JULIET," ACT III. SC. 2.
Few passages in Shakspeare have so often and so ineffectually been "winnowed" as the opening of the beautiful and passionate soliloquy of Juliet, when ardently and impatiently invoking night's return, which was to bring her newly betrothed lover to her arms. It stands thus in the first folio, from which the best quarto differs only in a few unimportant points of orthography:
"Gallop apace, you fiery footed steedes, Towards Phoebus' lodging, such a wagoner As Phaeton should whip you to the wish, And bring in cloudie night immediately. Spred thy close curtaine, Loue-performing night, That run-awayes eyes may wincke, and Romeo Leape to these armes, untalkt of and unseene", &c.
The older commentators do not attempt to change the word _run-awayes_, but seek to explain it. Warburton says Phoebus is the runaway. Steevens has a long argument to prove that Night is the runaway. Douce thought Juliet herself was the runaway; and at a later period the Rev. Mr. Halpin, in a very elegant and ingenious essay, attempts to prove that by the runaway we must understand Cupid.
MR. KNIGHT and MR. COLLIER have both of them adopted Jackson's conjecture of _unawares_, and have admitted it to the honour of a place in the text, but MR. DYCE has pronounced it to be "villainous;" and it must be confessed that it has nothing but a slight similarity to the old word to recommend it. MR. DYCE himself has favoured us with three suggestions; the first two in his _Remarks on Collier and Knight's Shakspeare_, in 1844, where he says--
"That _ways_ (the last syllable of _run-aways_) ought to be _days_, I feel next to certain; but what word originally preceded it I do not pretend to determine:
'Spread thy close curtain, love-performing Night! That rude/soon (?) Day's eyes may wink, and Romeo Leap to these arms, untalk'd of and unseen,' &c."
The correctors of MR. COLLIER's folio having substituted--
MR. DYCE, in his recent _Few Notes_, properly rejects that reading, and submits another conjecture of his own, founded on the supposition that the word _roving_ having been written illegibly, _roavinge_ was mistaken for _run-awayes_, and proposes to read--