'Behold, there is no grief like this;

The barren blossom of thy prayer,
Thou shalt find out how sweet it is.

O fools and blind, what seek ye there
High up in the air?'

Those who hoped in immortality were met by the assurance that

'The grave's mouth laughs into derision,
Desire and dread and dream and vision,

Delight of heaven and sorrow of hell ;'

while those who even if all else were gone, held fast by the virtue which their souls knew to be good, were startled by the song, 'Before Dawn,'

and the question and invocation of the address to 'Dolores,'

Thou wert fair in the fearless old fashion,

And thy limbs are as melodies yet,

And move to the music of passion

With lithe and lascivious regret.

What ailed us, O gods, to desert you

For creeds that refuse and restrain?

Come down and redeem us from virtue,

Our Lady of Pain.'

We have no wish to forget what Mr. Swinburne in his own person said of all this. In the pamphlet to which reference has been made, and which is valuable as a presentation of the poet's attitude as seen by himself, he says,- With regard to any opinion implied or expressed throughout my book, I desire that one thing should be remembered: the book is dramatic, many-faced, multifarious; and no utterance of enjoyment or despair, belief or unbelief, can properly be assumed as the assertion of its author's personal feeling or faith. Were each poem to be accepted as the deliberate outcome and result of the author's conviction, not mine alone, but most other men's verses would leave nothing behind them but a sense of cloudy

chaos and suicidal contradiction. Byron and Shelley, speaking in their own persons, and with what sublime effect we know, openly and insultingly mocked and reviled what the English of their day held most sacred. I have not done this. I do not say that, if I chose, I would not do so to the best of my power; I do say that hitherto I have seen fit to do nothing of the kind.' The words which we have printed in italics suffice to show that in regarding Mr. Swinburne as a defier of current instincts and convictions, the critics were right in their conclusion, even if their premises were insufficient to support it. But were the premises insufficient? We have too much respect for Mr. Swinburne's genius and too much regard and admiration for many beautiful and blameless embodiments of it to allow us to be consciously unfair to him; but this question is one which it is impossible honestly to answer in the affirmative. In the dramatic form of utterance, the personality of the utterer is certainly to some extent disguised, but the disguise can never be so perfect as to hide him from recognition. There is something to be gathered from the mere choice of the character to be dramatically represented, something from its pose and attitude, and still something more from the manner of expression which gives even to a dramatic utterance the personal quality of a lyric. By this note of individuality we track the man Shakespeare through the maze of purely objective comedy and tragedy, find hints of him in Romeo, in Hamlet, in Prince Henry, in Prospero, and never think of doubting the power of our vision to pierce the dramatic veil. No sensible critic ever thought of identifying Mr. Swinburne completely with those dramatic beings, the men or women who are supposed to speak in such poems as Anactoria,' The Leper,' Dolores,' The Hymn to Proserpine,' and half a dozen others that we could name, any more than Shakespeare can be completely identified with any one of the characters just named, but there is no mistaking the sympathetic touch whereever it is found in either set of portraits; and in Mr. Swinburne's case we can verify inferences drawn from the purely dramatic utterances by finding their parallels in poems which are to all appearance not in the least dramatic, but

6

purely lyrical and personal. As dramatist and as lyrist alike the poet presents himself to us as a revolutionary, or, as we have called him, a rebel; engaged sometimes in noble rebellions against the tyrannies of force or custom which cripple the free energies of the human spirit, and sometimes, particu larly in these early poems, in rebellions which are less noble or even positively ignoble, against the necessary and wholesome laws by which those energies are guided into channels of fruitful service. We have dwelt at perhaps too great length upon the latter tendency, but it has been convenient to emphasise the points in which Mr. Swinburne's message differs from that of Mr. Tennyson. The elder poet calls his contemporaries to a wise acquiescence and content, the younger is full of questioning and discontent which may at times be unwise, and which must always seem more unwise than their opposites, but which may be at other times a divine madness which is the highest wisdom. Mr. Tennyson found rest for the spirit in the contemplation of his England, where Freedom broadens slowly down from precedent to precedent; Mr. Swinburne has dreamed the dream of Mazzini for his Italy, a dream of conquest over precedents of bondage, and turning to look at home is mournful rather than jubilant.

'England, what of the night?

Night is for slumber and sleep,
Warm, no season to weep.

Let me alone till the day.

Sleep would I still if I might,

Who have slept for two hundred years.

Once I had honour, they say:

But slumber is sweeter than tears.'

There may be, nay, there is, exaggeration in this; but even in the face of exaggeration it may not unsuccessfully be pleaded that there is more of the breath of eager life, more of the element that is sanative and stimulating, in the shrill chant which emphasises the distance between what is and what might be between the 'petty done' and the 'undone vast— than in the sweeter more soothing song of fulfilled satisfaction in the achievements of a thousand yesterdays. Each word

has its season: one is the poetry of youth, the other of maturity; and while youth has its extravagances which maturity corrects, youth has its vitalising enthusiasms and quick insights which maturity too often cools and dims.

With Mr. Swinburne the years are dealing kindly. So far, there is no sign that they have impaired the swift potency of his passion, but they have led it into calmer ways than those in which it once loved to wander. The wine of genius has been clarified without losing strength or flavour; has gained a delicacy and aroma far better worth having than the first fiery stimulation. The second series of the Poems and Ballads, published in 1878, showed what the poet had gained in sanity of outlook and breadth of comprehension in the seven years which had passed since the appearance of its startling predecessor; the Songs of the Spring-tides told the same story; and it the Century of Roundels, while there is still the old fervour, it is chastened and sweetened into an attractive calm. He has found other promptings to song than the impulse of protest and defiance, and can delight himself fully in singing graciously of gracious things,—of the love of friends, of noble painting and music, of little children in life and death, of the gladness rather than the passion of air and sea. Of pure thought or of suggestion of thought, there is less in the work of Mr. Swinburne than in that of either of his great contemporaries; he is a poet of simple emotion, rather than of that interpenetration of thought and emotion which gives to poetry its highest interest; and the element of permanence in his work is found less in its substance than its form,-in his comprehension and command of the uttermost possibilities of rhythmic speech, in the wealth and splendour of his varied music, in the quick sympathy which has enabled him to give penetrating expression to the inarticulate restlessness of an age of transition.

In both quantity and quality of purely intellectual interest, the poems of Mr. Browning are beyond doubt much richer than those of Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Swinburne. So much so that certain critics, astute rather than profound, seem inclined to regard him as a thinker par excellence, and a poet par hasard.

This is, of course, a superficial view, founded on a vague notion that poetry and thought are somehow mutually exclusive, and that a poem is the expression, not of the intellect, but of the emotions. This notion is the more influential because it is not wholly false, but half-true. Neither naked thought nor naked emotion is the material of poetry, but either becomes such when clothed in the vesture of imagination; and emotion lends itself more readily than thought to such investment, because only when thought is touched and warmed by emotion, does it become susceptible of imaginative conception and expression. The thought, all men are mortal,' has not in itself any more of the nature of poetry than the thought, ‘parallel lines can never meet,' but the former has been made poetical by a thousand poets, because it appeals to the emotions, and through them to the imagination, while the latter which seems destitute of emotional value, must always belong to the region of prose. Mr. Browning's poems undoubtedly packed with thought, but he interfused the thought with the poetical quality and the reason why this interfusion has been missed by some critics is found in the facts that Mr. Browning has not sung of the old themes in the old way, that he has deserted the beaten highways and the familiar fields, that he has broken and annihilated recognised frontiers, and has widened the region of imaginative apprehension by wholesale annexation of new territory. His gamut of emotional sensibility is so wide that he can strike notes unstruck before; and because his is a new music-a veritable addition to the world's store of harmonies -it is declared by those who are accustomed to the old chords and the familiar harmonies to be no music at all.

is or

are

has

When we understand all that is meant and implied by this enlargement of the world of imagination, we see that it is Mr. Browning's special gift to the men of his time. Moods, situations, and crises in life which have seemed to most of his predecessors if indeed they have noticed them at all—mere isolated and therefore barren facts, appealing only to the perceptive intellect and belonging to the realm of prose, are discerned by his imaginative vision to be symbolic presenta