Charged, then, with other men’s purposes—­this man’s Italian patriotism; this man’s love of sin (by that name, for sin has been denied, as a fiction, but Swinburne, following Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love it); this man’s despite against the Third Empire or what not; this man’s cry for a political liberty granted or gained long ago—­a cry grown vain; this man’s contempt for the Boers—­nay, was it so much as a man, with a man’s evil to answer for, that furnished him here; was it not rather that less guilty judge, the crowd?—­this man’s—­nay, this boy’s—­erotic sickness, or his cruelty—­charged with all these, Swinburne’s poetry is primed; it explodes with thunder and fire.  But such sharing is somewhat too familiar for dignity; such community of goods parodies the Franciscans.  As one friar goes darned for another’s rending, having no property in cassock or cowl, so does many a poet, not in humility, but in a paradox of pride, boast of the past of others.  And yet one might rather choose to make use of one’s fellow-men’s old shoes than to put their old secrets to usufruct, and dress poetry in a motley of shed passions, twice corrupt.  Promiscuity of love we have heard of; Pope was accused, by Lord Hervey’s indignation and wit, of promiscuity of hatred, and of scattering his disfavours in the stews of an indiscriminate malignity; and here is another promiscuity—­that of memories, and of a licence partaken.

But by the unanimous poets’ splendid love of the landscape and the skies, by this also was Swinburne possessed, and in this he triumphed.  By this, indeed, he profited; here he joined an innumerable company of that heavenly host of earth.  Let us acknowledge then his honourable alacrity here, his quick fellowship, his agile adoption, and his filial tenderness—­nay, his fraternal union with his poets.  No tourist’s admiration for all things French, no tourist’s politics in Italy—­and Swinburne’s French and Italian admirations have the tourist manner of enthusiasm—­prompts him here.  Here he aspires to brotherhood with the supreme poets of supreme England, with the sixteenth century, the seventeenth, and the nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song.  Happy is he to be admitted among these, happy is he to merit by his wonderful voice to sing their raptures.  Here is no humiliation in ready-made lendings; their ecstasy becomes him.  He is glorious with them, and we can imagine this benign and indulgent Nature confounding together the sons she embraces, and making her poets—­the primary and the secondary, the greater and the lesser—­all equals in her arms.  Let us see him in that company where he looks noble amongst the noble; let us not look upon him in the company of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler still, being servile to them; let us look upon him with the lyrical Shakespeare, with Vaughan, Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not with Baudelaire and Gautier; with the poets of the forest and the sun, and not with those of the alcove.  We can make peace with him for love of them; we can imagine them thankful to him who, poor and perverse in thought in so many pages, could yet join them in such a song as this: