Sometimes we gain no more definite ideas from reading many lines of his verse than from hearing music without words.  Much of his poetry was suggested by wide reading, not by close personal contact with life.  His verse sometimes offends from disregarding moral proprieties and from so expressing his atheism as to wound the feelings of religious people.  His idea of a Supreme Power was colored by the old Grecian belief in Fate.  In exact opposition to Wordsworth, Swinburne’s youthful poems show that he regarded Nature as the incarnation of a Power malevolent to man.  He lacked the optimism of Browning and the faith of Tennyson.  The mantle of Byron and Shelley fell on Swinburne as the poet of revolt against what seemed to be religious or political tyranny.

After Tennyson’s death, in 1892, Swinburne was the greatest living English poet; but, even if his verse had not offended Queen Victoria for the foregoing reasons, she would not have appointed him poet-laureate after the misery of the Russians had moved him in 1890 to write, referring to the Czar:—­

  “Night hath naught but one red star—­Tyrannicide.

  “God or man, be swift; hope sickens with delay: 
  Smite and send him howling down his father’s way.”

Swinburne’s crowning glory is his unquestioned mastery, unsurpassed by any poet since Milton, of the technique of varied melodious verse.  This quality is evident, no matter whether he is describing the laughter of a child:—­

  “Sweeter far than all things heard,
  Hand of harper, tone of bird,
  Sound of woods at sundawn stirr’d,
  Welling water’s winsome ward,
    Wind in warm wan weather,”

or expressing his fierce hatred for any condition or place where—­

  “...a curse was or a chain
  A throne for torment or a crown for bane
  Rose, moulded out of poor men’s molten pain,”

or singing the song of a lover—­

  “If love were what the rose is,
    And I were like the leaf,
  Our lives would grow together
  In sad or singing weather,
  Blown fields or flowerful closes,
    Green pleasure or grey grief;
  If love were what the rose is,
    And I were like the leaf;”

or voicing his early creed—­

“That no life lives forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river

    Winds somewhere safe to sea,”

or chanting in far nobler strains the Anglo-Saxon belief in the molding power of an infinite presence—­

“I am in thee to save thee,
As my soul in thee saith,
Give thou as I gave thee,
Thy life-blood and breath,
Green leaves of thy labor, white flowers of thy thought, and red
fruit of thy death.”

RUDYARD KIPLING, 1865-

[Illustration:  RUDYARD KIPLING. From the painting by John Collier.]