Earth's fragrance went with her, as in the wet grass
Her feet little hidden were set;

She bent down her head, 'neath the roses to pass,
And her arm with the lily was wet.

In the garden we wandered while day waned apace
And the thunder was dying aloof;

Till the moon o'er the minster-wall lifted his face,

And grey gleamed out the lead of the roof.

Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown;

In the trees the wind westering moved;

Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,

And in the dark house was I loved.

THE FLOWERING ORCHARD

[For a Silk Embroidery]

Lo, silken my garden
and silken my sky,
And silken my apple-boughs
hanging on high;

All wrought by the worm
in the peasant-carle's cot
On the mulberry leafage
when summer was hot.

ALGERNON CHARLES

SWINBURNE

[ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE was born on April 5, 1837, in London. He was the eldest son of Admiral Swinburne and Lady Jane, daughter of the third Earl of Ashburnham. He was sent to Eton in 1849 and left in 1853. After some private work with a tutor, he matriculated at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1856. He left Oxford, without a degree, in 1859, and settled in London. In 1860 his earliest volume, a brace of dramas in verse, was published, but he became first known to the public by Atalanta in Calydon (1865), which was quickly followed by Chastelard (1865) and Poems and Ballads (1866). The last named was accused of indecency and profanity, and produced a vociferous protest. The poet, however, was little moved, and continued to write in prose and verse with the greatest assiduity. His life, which was wholly dedicated to literature, was without external movement. In 1879, in consequence of his state of health, he was induced to take up his abode with a friend at Putney, and here he remained for nearly thirty years, in great retirement, which was partly forced upon him by his deafness. His daily walk over Putney Hill became classic. He died of pneumonia, after a short illness, on the 10th of April, 1909, and was buried at Bonchurch among the graves of his family.]

The gift by which Swinburne first won his way to the hearts of a multitude of readers was unquestionably the melody of his verse. The choruses in Atalanta in Calydon and the metrical inventions in Poems and Ballads acted on the ear of his contemporaries like an enchantment. Swinburne carried the prosody of the romantic age to its extreme point of mellifluousness, and he introduced into it a quality of speed, of throbbing velocity, which no one, not even Shelley, had anticipated. In some of the odes in Songs before Sunrise he went even farther, and produced effects of such sonorous volume and such elaborate antiphonal harmony that it was obvious that English verse, along those lines, could proceed no farther. In point of fact, after 1871, it did proceed no farther even in Swinburne's own hands, his later efforts to surpass his own miraculous virtuosity being less and less completely satisfactory, and indeed

more and more like an imitation of himself. The poem called Mater Triumphalis may be taken as the extreme instance of Swinburne's redundant volubility of sound before his talent in this direction began to decline, and we may hold it to be certain that in this species of prosody, about which a strong heretical reaction has long ago begun to set in, no other poet will ever surpass or even equal Swinburne.

This undisputed mastery in regular verse has, however, from the first tended to obscure the intellectual and imaginative qualities of a poet who was almost more directly and exclusively endowed with them than any one else who ever lived. There may, that is to say, have been greater poets than he, but none was ever more penetrated with a sense of his high calling, or enjoyed an intenser exhilaration in the performance of it. He was preserved by a remarkable strain of common sense from losing his sanity and even from plunging into extravagance, but he was always at the edge of frenzy, always simmering on the flames of his enthusiasm. This high literary temperature of Swinburne's was one of his most notable characteristics, and it must be borne in mind in every attempt to estimate the value of his work. It gave to his poems an impression of heat and speed, a sort of volcanic impetus, which delighted those who liked it and infuriated those who did not. In the beginning, it was impossible to estimate the poems of Swinburne without prejudice. There is still no recent figure more difficult to approach judicially.

To begin to comprehend him we must perceive that he was completely dominated by the intuitive forms of sensibility, in the Kantian sense. His mind and character are neither intelligible nor worthy of attention unless we regard them from the æsthetic point of view. Other great poets present various facets of being which may not be so important or so striking as their literary side, but are perceptible. Swinburne alone is a man of letters, or nothing at all. His long life offers us a series of extraordinary negatives; he was never married, he was never responsible for the career of another human being, he possessed no home of his own, he exercised no business or profession, he passed through the years like the fabulous Bird of Paradise, which never perched, because it had no feet. Swinburne never perched, but we may pursue the image so far as to say that when he was weary of his ceaseless flight, in middle age, he sank upon a nest from which he never had the energy to rise again. Charles Darwin tells us that "birds appear

to be the most æsthetic of all animals"; Swinburne, who was often compared with a bird, was the most æsthetic of all human beings.

The dullness of his final thirty years in a sort of voluntary captivity at Putney has tended to obscure the picturesque legend of his prime, to which it is essential that memory should return. His childhood and early youth-contrary to the customary idea— were not artistically productive; his old age was monotonous and insipid; but there was a middle period of about twenty years in which he flamed like a comet right across our poetical heavens. This period extended from his last term at Oxford to the rapid decline of his energy when he had passed his fortieth birthday. During the first half of this part of his career he was known only to a close circle of admirers; from 1865 to 1875, or a little later, he was the cynosure and centre of public curiosity, awakening in the latter case such passions of adoration and loathing, rapture and fear, as literature had wholly ceased to rouse since 1815. He represented to a dazzled generation the uncontrolled worship of beauty, and he did so with unrivalled power because he was so disinterested. The world was astonished at the phenomenon of a voice which rang out like that of the angel of the Morning Star, and which yet, so far as action went, was nothing but a voice. Swinburne reminded us of the hero of Gautier's novel (which he admired so extravagantly) "dont la sensualité imaginative s'est compliquée et raffinée, avant l'expérience, dans les musées et les bibliothèques." Swinburne displayed a prodigious sensibility, which was fed on books and pictures, not on life.

We shall, therefore, not merely fail to appreciate the position of Swinburne, but stumble blindly in our examination of his qualities, if we do not begin by perceiving that, to a degree unparalleled, he was cerebral in all his forces. He was an unbodied intelligence "hidden in the light of thought," showering a rain of melody from some altitude untouched by the drawbacks and privileges of mortality. Tennyson might have been a farmer, Browning a stockbroker; Rossetti was a painter and Morris an upholsterer; but it is impossible to conceive Swinburne as "taking up" any species of useful employment. To our great good fortune, he was possessed of what are called "moderate means," which happily clung to him, by no conscious effort of his own, to the end of his days. He was therefore able to spin out his dream and his music without any species of material disturbance, his only approaches to "action" being the chimerical controversies, always on æsthetic questions,

in which he engaged with mimic fury. These were to him what golf is to other ageing men: they were a form of health-preserving exercise.

It might have been supposed that a being so isolated from the common occupations of mankind, and so exclusively saturated in literature, would be imitative, artificial, and ineffective when he came to the task of composition. But the paradox is that Swinburne, soaked as he was in the wisdom of the ages, responsive like an Æolian harp to every breath of the wind of past poetry, is one of the most definitely original of all writers. He is himself to a fault, to our positive impatience and annoyance; he has a quality of style, a sort of perfume, which is so exclusively his own that it vexes us when or where it ceases to please us. Swinburne was a master of every artifice of imitation, and yet-except where he is intentionally a parodist-he is instantly recognizable under all disguises. He floods whatever he touches with his own pungent musk.

By heritage on both sides Algernon Swinburne was an aristocrat, and of his descent and bringing-up he retained something perceptible in his poetry-its fastidiousness, its independence which was affected neither by popular prejudice nor by the authority of tradition. In private life his manners were affable and gracious, but they were ceremonious too; and we may see in his poetical attitude a distinct trace of hauteur. Apart from this emphasis, this touch of conscious dignity, there was in his original gesture towards literature a certain arrogant disregard of public taste, a disdain which was of the aristocratic order. At a marvellously early age, and apparently by unaided instinct, he discovered the poets who were, to the very close of his life, to remain his most cherished companions. The little Eton schoolboy who selected Landor, Marlowe, and Catullus as his favourite writers, without the smallest affectation, because they pleased him best, because they thrilled him with rapture, might be expected, when, long years later, he too became a writer, to trouble himself not a whit about the accepted fashions of the hour.

Swinburne's attitude of rebellion was not plainly discerned, though it was indicated, in his earlier publications, which were all of the dramatic order. But from 1859 until he published Poems and · Ballads in 1866 he was preparing what amounted to a lyrical and therefore apparently a personal manifesto of rebellion against the poetical taste of the day. The key-note of that much-discussed volume was a mutinous one; on the ethical, the religious, and the