energy in varied technique which has passed since he wrote Atalanta the powers of the poet had steadily strengthened and matured. Under its austere form Atalanta pulses with the luxuriant exuberance of youthful romanticism. Its arraignment of the gods and most of its choruses are really as modern in temper as Prometheus Unbound. Erechtheus is a much more serious attempt to solve the problem which has fascinated many generations of poets from Milton to Shelley, from Landor to

'Argument,' written in prose as magical as that of the Authorised Version. Or take 'Anactoria' (perhaps the pinnacle of his achievements in point of form), or 'On the Cliffs,' in which he captures the uncapturable Sapphic cadence:

Bid not ache nor agony break nor master,
Lady, my spirit.

But of all Mr Swinburne's spiritual transmigrations Erechtheus is the most wonderful. Its cold austerity of contour, its pure sanity of style, its noble patriotism, its holy maternal heroism, its magnanimity, and its clangorous songs of storm and battle are all built up into an edifice of balanced beauty and symmetrical strength. The choruses in Erechtheus will never be so popular as the choruses in Atalanta; but in perfection of form and unity of spirit it is nobler than Atalanta, and indeed nobler than any other reincarnation of Greek art.

economy of correction. The same tendency may be seen in Browning, whose Gothic grotesquerie and barbaric formlessness were always sprawling at the feet of Greek sanity and Greek beauty. The most paradoxical feature of Mr Swinburne's Hellenism is its co-existence with his romanticism. His imagination is Protean. He assumes the very soul of a period, and for the time sings as if he were a poet of the time. At one moment he is an Elizabethan dramatist, at another a Hebrew seer, at another a French lyrist, at another a Greek poet. His mastery of multifarious styles is unparalleled. The vivid Greek verses prefixed to Atalanta are followed by the no less vivid

After Erechtheus the romantic temper

reconquered

the poet's imagination, and since then it has maintained its ascendency. This no doubt is partly due to the influence of the closer intimacy which sprang up

about this time between him and the great romantic poet and critic Mr Theodore WattsDunton. It was in 1879 that the two friends became permanent housemates at The Pines, Putney Hill. They have lived together ever since. In these days when literary friendships are sometimes more perilous than literary enmities, the spectacle of a literary friendship which has endured for thirty years refutes a reproach which is often cast at the Republic of Letters. Though living so near London, Mr Swinburne is not of London, and his days pass serenely between the lintels of literature and life. Yet he is by no means the bookish recluse of popular legend. He sees

many friends at The Pines. He is full of physical
fire and energy.
A great lover of long rambles, he
is seen every morning 'walking the Wimbledon
postman off his legs.' He is like a boy in his
hearty love for the open air. He never deigns
to wear an overcoat or to carry an umbrella or
to wear a glove, but swings along with an
elastic stride in winter and summer, in wind
and snow and rain, with a gusto for all weathers
as hearty as George Borrow's. He still delights
in swimming with his friend, who as a boy swam
at Cromer with George Borrow. The value of a
comradeship so congenial in so many ways to
Mr. Swinburne's essentially sociable nature can
hardly be exaggerated, and there can be no doubt
that his genius owes much to the sympathy and
the incitement of this ideal companionship. Tris-
tram of Lyonesse (1882) was inscribed: 'To my
best friend, Theodore Watts, I dedicate in this
book the best I have to give him;' and to it
was prefixed this beautiful sonnet :

Spring speaks again, and all our woods are stirred,
And all our wide glad wastes aflower around,
That twice have heard keen April's clarion sound
Since first we here together saw and heard
Spring's light reverberate and reiterate word

Shine forth and speak in season. Life stands crowned
Here with the best one thing it ever found,
As of my soul's best birthdays dawns the third.

There is a friend that as the wise man saith

Cleaves closer than a brother: nor to me

Hath time not shown, through days like waves at
strife,

This truth more sure than all things else but death,
This pearl most perfect found in all the sea

That washes toward your feet these waifs of life. Assuredly the poet gave his 'best,' for besides Tristram, in which the impassioned splendour of his lyrical genius culminated, the volume contains some of his finest sonnets (including the superb cameos of the Elizabethan dramatists) and that lovely nosegay of child-songs, 'A Dark Month.' In A Midsummer Holiday (1884), which was also inscribed To Theodore Watts,' Mr. Swinburne commemorated a holiday spent with his friend on the East Anglian coast. As this volume contains some of Mr Swinburne's most magnificent seaballads, a word about his passion for the sea may not be out of place. Doubtless other poets have sung the sea, but no other poet has sung it so spontaneously and so sincerely. Most of our poets, from Campbell to Kipling, regard the sea either as a stage for our naval heroes, or material for metaphor, or as a stock-pot of sentiment, or as a reservoir of rhetoric. Even Byron addresses the ocean as if it were a public meeting. Mr Swinburne was the first poet to escape from all these artificialities and to do for the sea what Wordsworth did for the land. His clean rapture in the sea is free from literary affectation. The glorious description of Tristram swimming is

as

written in the grandly spacious manner of the greatest poetry:

And he, ere night's wide work lay all undone,
As earth from her bright body casts off night,
Cast off his raiment for a rapturous fight
And stood between the sea's edge and the sea
Naked, and godlike of his mould as he

Whose swift foot's sound shook all the towers of
Troy ;

So clothed with might, so girt upon with joy,
As, ere the knife had shorn to feed the fire
His glorious hair before the unkindled pyre
Whereon the half of his great heart was laid,
Stood, in the light of his live limbs arrayed,
Child of heroic earth and heavenly sea,
The flower of all men: scarce less bright than he,
If any of all men latter-born might stand,
Stood Tristram, silent, on the glimmering strand.
Not long but with a cry of love that rang
As from a trumpet golden-mouthed, he sprang,
As toward a mother's where his head might rest
Her child rejoicing, toward the strong sea's breast
That none may gird nor measure: and his heart
Sent forth a shout that bade his lips not part,
But triumphed in him silent: no man's voice,
No song, no sound of clarions that rejoice,
Can set that glory forth which fills with fire
The body and soul that have their whole desire
Silent, and freer than birds or dreams are free
Take all their will of all the encountering sea.
And toward the foam he bent and forward smote,
Laughing, and launched his body like a boat
Full to the sea breach, and against the tide
Struck strongly forth with amorous arms made wide
To take the bright breast of the wave to his
And on his lips the sharp sweet minute's kiss
Given of the wave's lip for a breath's space curled
And pure as at the daydawn of the world.
And round him all the bright rough shuddering sea
Kindled, as though the world were even as he,
Heart-stung with exultation of desire :
And all the life that moved him seemed to aspire,
As all the sea's life toward the sun and still
Delight within him waxed with quickening will
More smooth and strong and perfect as a flame
That springs and spreads, till each glad limb became
A note of rapture in the tune of life,

Like music mild and keen as sleep and strife:
Till the sweet change that bids the sense grow sure
Of deeper depth and purity more pure
Wrapped him and lapped him round with clearer cold,
And all the rippling green grew royal gold
Between him and the far sun's rising rim.
And like the sun his heart rejoiced in him,
And brightened with a broadening flame of mirth :
And hardly seemed its life a part of earth,
But the life kindled of a fiery birth
And passion of a new-begotten son
Between the live sea and the living sun.
And mightier grew the joy to meet full-faced
Each wave, and mount with upward plunge, and taste
The rapture of its rolling strength, and cross
Its flickering crown of snows that flash and toss
Like plumes in battle's blithest charge, and thence
To match the next with yet more strenuous sense;
Till on his eyes the light beat hard and bade

His face turn west and shoreward through the glad
Swift revel of the waters golden-clad,
And back with light reluctant heart he bore
Across the broad-backed rollers in to shore.

As examples of Mr Swinburne's later sea poetry, we may mention those magnificent ballads, ‘In the Water' and 'On the Verge.'

Since the publication of A Midsummer Holiday Mr Swinburne has devoted himself mainly to poetic drama in the Elizabethan manner. In Marino Faliero (1885) he handled with great power the well-known story of the octogenarian doge of Venice. Faliero is a magnificent conception, and the stainless loves of Bertuccio and the Duchess are as pure and as fresh as the loves of Dante and Beatrice. It is indeed a curious error to imagine that the Swinburnian conception of love is solely or even mainly sensual. The truth is that in Mr Swinburne's poetry many phases of the love-passion are found. No doubt he seems to accentuate the sensual as distinguished from the sentimental side of love; and the explanation is to be sought not only in the poet's passionate temperament, but in his saturation with Greek poetry, in which love is an animal appetite like hunger or thirst. Further, his Elizabethanism leads him into direct locutions which are at variance with the modern taste for veiled suggestion. Stress is often laid on his Gallicism, but in point of fact his temper is utterly different from the Gallic temper, preferring plain, downright Saxon to salacious euphemism and suggestive periphrasis. The present literary convention is not likely to be permanent, and it must be said that Mr Swinburne's fearless candour is broader and larger and in essence more wholesome than the mawkish sentimentalism of the fading Victorian age. Chastelard is a poignantly true study of a young man fascinated by the selfish cynicism of a beautiful woman. Everybody knows that there are women who dominate men not by their nobility, but by their ignobility-women whose charm is a repulsive attraction. But Mr Swinburne shows other aspects of love. It would be hard to match in our literature the extreme exaltation and heroic purity of the erotic passages in Tristram. Here the love-passion is shown in its healthiest and wholesomest phase, a phase which stands midway between Greek animalism and Victorian sentiment. Since Marino Faliero Mr Swinburne has published three plays: Locrine (1887), The Sisters (1892), and Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards (1899). In addition to the volumes of poems already mentioned, he has published Songs of Two Nations (1875); Poems and Ballads: Second Series (1878); Poems and Ballads: Third Series (1889); Songs of the Springtides (1880); Studies in Song (1880); The Heptalogia, or the Seven against Sense (1880); A Century of Roundels (1883); Astrophel (1894); The Tale of Balen (1896). He has also made a volume of Selections from his poetical works.

His prose

works include George Chapman: a Critical Essay (1875); A Note on Charlotte Brontë (1877); A Study of Shakespeare (1880); Miscellanies (1886); A Study of Victor Hugo (1886); A Study of Ben Jonson (1889); Studies in Prose and Poetry (1894). He has also contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica and to the leading monthly reviews many valuable critical monographs and essays. In his numerous studies of the Elisabethan dramatists he has done more than any writer save Charles Lamb to revive interest in the great poets so long overshadowed by the genius of Shakespeare.

In many respects, indeed, Mr Swinburne is more Elizabethan than Victorian.. Like Ben Jonson he is 'passionately kind and angry,' and like Marlowe he is all air and fire.' No modern poet is more utterly born and more utterly made a poet. There seems to be no thread of prose in his nature. His imagination is perpetually incandescent, his poetic energy always at white heat. He sees everything in terms of poetry. He has no gift of prose compromise or secular conciliation. His intellect is worked by his imagination so swiftly that it seems uncontrollable; but in reality he is a perfect master of his vehicle. It is possible for a poet to be too poetical for his time, for in all save the golden ages of literature, poetry is a foreign language to four men out of five and to nine critics out of ten. Learning does not endow a man with the power of knowing poetry when he sees it. That is why so much modern criticism is preoccupied with the unpoetic elements of poetry -with its philosophy, its morality, its message to the age, its anecdotes, and so forth. Before poetry like Mr Swinburne's didactic criticism is dumb, searching in vain for the facile novelette, the easy platitude, the pious truism. He is a singer and nothing but a singer :

He sings in music for the music comes.

In Tennyson's just phrase, 'he is a reed through which all things blow into music.' This, far from being a defect, is a unique power, for he has made poetry almost as sensuously emotional and imaginative as music. It is with music that his poetry ought to be compared, for it affects the intellectual feelings not merely through the logical faculty, but mainly through the aural imagination. It rolls along in vast volumes of subtly modulated melody, in long, undulant waves of rhythmic harmony that elate and exalt, trouble and charm, thrill and enthrall the mind. It enters the soul not by the avenue of the eye, but by the avenue of the ear; not like the coloured song of Milton or Shakespeare, Keats or Wordsworth, but like the symphonies and sonatas, the operas and oratorios, of the great musical composers. Other poetry may be read by the eye: his must be read by the ear. Unfortunately, in modern times the habit of reading poetry aloud has died out, and most men in the presence of poetry are like the deaf at a concert or the colour-blind in a picture gallery. That is why

the magnitude of Mr Swinburne's creative energy is unsuspected by students trained in the old didactic school. Bewildered by his manifold music, they charge him with masking his intellectual poverty under sonorous verbiage. It is strange that a fallacy so uncritical should pass for criticism. In sheer intellectual power of the imagination Mr Swinburne is surpassed by none of his contemporaries. The fact that his intellect expresses itself in so many new metrical forms proves rather than disproves its strength: for in his best work the conquest of sense is not less complete than the conquest of sound; the mastery of mind is as triumphant as the mastery of music. The quality of intellectual imagination displayed in 'Atalanta,' 'Erechtheus,' 'Tristram,' 'Hertha,' 'Tiresias,' 'The Hymn to Proserpine,' 'The Hymn of Man,' 'The Eve of Revolution,' 'Ave Atque Vale' (a threnody as fine as Lycidas or Adonais), 'The Triumph of Time,' 'A Forsaken Garden,' 'Hesperia,' 'The Garden of Proserpine,' 'By the North Sea,' ‘A Nympholept,' 'A Song in Time of Order,' 'Itylus,' 'Jacobite Song,' 'Cor Cordium,' 'Ilicet,' 'Christmas Antiphones,' and in scores of lyrics, songs, and sonnets, is of the first order. Full justice has never been done to the intellectual subtlety of such a poem as 'Hertha :'

lyric is not verbal parsimony, but musical richness;
for here it is music that expresses emotion-music
and music alone, music often without colour, music
often without pictorial flashes. Of course there
are unvitalised tracts in Swinburne, as in all poets,
where the music expresses no emotion, and then,
no doubt, as Mr Myers said, we must read the
emotion into the music. But true criticism must
recognise that diffuseness is as legitimate in ana-
pæsts and dactyls as it is illegitimate in iambs. For
it has been shown that, owing to the dominance
in English of the consonants over the vowels, the
anapæstic line, with its crowded syllables, becomes
'pebbly' unless the corners are bevelled off by
liquids; and the available words containing l's
and r's being limited, the expression of the thought
must be manipulated in order to include them.
The result is that the poet in his search for
music diverges from concise and direct utterance,
deliberately sacrificing verbal brevity to verbal
music. Another charge brought against Mr
Swinburne concerns his undoubtedly excessive
use of alliteration. Here again the explanation
is to be found in the laws governing anapæstic
and dactylic verse; for if daring liquidation is
necessary to oil the clogging consonants, daring
alliteration is necessary to drive them along.
Therefore criticism must recognise that bold alli-
teration is as legitimate in anapæsts and dactyls
as it is illegitimate in iambs. If we study, for
example, one of the loveliest choruses in Atalanta,
the hymn to Artemis, we shall see that its rhythmi-
cal beauty could not have been achieved without
liquidation and alliteration :

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months in meadow or plain

Fills the shadows and windy places

With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain ;

And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,

For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent, and with emptying of quivers, Maiden most perfect, lady of light,

With a noise of winds and many rivers,

With a clamour of waters, and with might;

Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendour and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day, and the feet of the night.
Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round our knees, and cling?

O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player,
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
And the south-west wind and the west wind sing.
For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
The full streams feed on flowers of rushes,
Ripe grasses trammel a travelling foot,

The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit ;
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,
And the oat is heard above the lyre,
And the hoofèd heel of a satyr crushes

The chestnut husk at the chestnut-root.
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Manad and the Bassarid;

And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.

The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair
Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes;
The wild vine slipping down leaves bare

Her bright breast shortening into sighs;

The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves,
But the berried ivy catches and cleaves
To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare
The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies.

It may seem superfluous to praise the metrical splendour of this immortal lyric, but one may pardonably dwell on the magical effect produced by the introduction of the couplet after the fourth line; by the choice of a dactyl for the opening of the second stanza instead of the anapæst used for the opening of the first stanza; and by the thunderous reiteration of the word 'fire' in the fourth line of the third stanza.

It must be admitted that in rhymed iambic measures Mr Swinburne is often too diffuse and too alliterative. This is due partly to his training in dancing metres, and partly to his undoubted passion for sacrificing the demands of the eye to the demands of the ear. His habit of allowing the rhyme to master his imagination continually retards the imaginative περιπέτεια :

For rhyme the rudder is of verses,

With which, like ships, they steer their courses. Indeed, it must be said that no great poet has ever defied so defiantly the maxim, Ars est celare artem. He seems to reveal his art as carefully as other poets conceal it. But it would be absurd to suppose that he does so by chance and not by design. He doubtless deliberately accepts the loss in illusion for the sake of the gain in music. It is uncritical, therefore, to censure as insincerity what is evidently a deliberate means towards a definite end. The question whether the end justifies the means is a question of ear as well as eye; for undoubtedly undue servility to the eye tends towards metrical monotony as great as the metrical monotony produced by undue servility to the ear.

On the whole, it must be allowed that Mr Swinburne, by vindicating the stifled claims of lyrical music, has enriched our poetry with an almost inexhaustible variety of new rhythms, new metres, new measures, and new rhymes. He has, indeed, no rival as a metrical inventor. As a specimen of his extreme subtlety in this respect, it is sufficient to cite 'Super Flumina Babylonis,' one of the many grandly sonorous metrical structures which he has built upon the prose cadences of the Old Testament:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept,
Remembering thee,

That for ages of agony hast endured, and slept,
And wouldst not see.

Apart from its rhythmical beauty, this poem illustrates the Hebraic temper of the poet's genius. In prophetic grandeur and moral sublimity he is close of kin to the great Israelitish seers. His imaginative metempsychosis of the august Hebrew spirit is, indeed, one of the most original features of his poetry, and suggests a comparison with Milton's Hebraism which would, however, take us too far afield.

Another marvellous feat of metrical creation is the Koppós in Atalanta, remarkable for rhythmical qualities quite different from those displayed in the poems already mentioned:

Meleager.

Let your hands meet

Round the weight of my head;

Lift ye my feet

As the feet of the dead;

For the flesh of my body is molten, the limbs of it molten as lead. . .

Unto each man his fate;

Unto each as he saith In whose fingers the weight

Of the world is as breath;

Yet I would that in clamour of battle mine hands had laid hold upon death. . . .

Would God he had found me
Beneath fresh boughs!

Would God he had bound me

Unawares in mine house,

With light in mine eyes, and songs in my lips, and a crown on my brows! . . .

But thou, O mother,

The dreamer of dreams,

Wilt thou bring forth another

To feel the sun's beams

When I move among shadows a shadow, and wail by impassable streams? . . .

Chorus.

When thou dravest the men Of the chosen of Thrace, None turned him again

Nor endured he thy face

Clothed round with the blush of the battle, with light from a terrible place.