Shelley's apostrophe

In Percy Shelley's poem "The Moon" (which I posted for his birthday) he writes;

And, like a dying lady lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber

What's up with apostrophe? Surely Shelley had command of that unruly punctuation mark?

In the 18th and early 19th century English, as it always is, was changing. In 1712, for instance, Jonathan Swift wrote disapprovingly of many things, including something Shelley was doing ninety years later:

There is another Sett of Men who have contributed very much to the spoiling of the English Tongue; I mean the Poets, from the Time of the Restoration. These Gentlemen, although they could not be insensible how much our Language was already overstocked with Monosyllables; yet, to same Time and Pains, introduced that barbarous Custom of abbreviating Words, to fit them to the Measure of their Verses; and this they have frequently done, so very injudiciously, as to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They have joined the most obdurate Consonants without one intervening Vowel, only to shorten a Syllable: And their Taste in time became so depraved, that what was a first a Poetical Licence, not to be justified, they made their Choice, alledging, that the Words pronounced at length, sounded faint and languid. This was a Pretence to take up the same Custom in Prose; so that most of the Books we see now a-days, are full of those Manglings and Abbreviations. Instances of this Abuse are innumerable: What does Your Lordship [the Earl of Oxford, to whom this was addressed] think of the Words, Drudg'd, Disturb'd, Rebuk't, Fledg'd, and a thousand others, every where to be met in Prose as well as Verse? Where, by leaving out a Vowel to save a Syllable, we form so jarring a Sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondred how it could ever obtain.

I think we'd all agree that Swift has issues. (What's with the hate for Northern ears?) His capitalization will strike us as, well, shall we say overdone? Idiosyncratic? Wrong? Especially, perhaps, we'd agree that his commas are far too numerous.

Perhaps more importantly, many of us don't quite get the whole point of his complaint: drudged, disturbed, rebuked, fledged and the thousand others (such as Shelley's wrapped) don't have an extra syllable in them; it's not like, say, learn'd in the learn'd gentleman instead of learnéd. Of course, the verb is one syllable learned... Aha!

Yes. Just like the "silent e" at the end of so many English words, the e in the past-tense morpheme -ed is almost always silent now, but not originally. Originally, all those words were pronounced with an actual /ɪ̈d/ at the end (or maybe /əd/, but at any rate a full syllable, such as now only remains in verbs ending with a dental (t, d) such as spotted, wounded, darted, kidded, hatted, hated). In many other cases, the adjective derived from the participle retains the syllable though the verb doesn't, as in learnéd and also things like wingéd horse, blesséd event, jaggéd edge, doggéd detective, crookéd street - note the verbs are all Swift's detested monosyllables (winged away, blessed the child, jagged the material, dogged his footsteps, crooked his elbow).

If he were writing now, Shelley could just spell it "wrapped in a gauzy veil". But back then, that would have been one syllable too many.