of terms.”  He went off to Northumberland to escape from his wretchedness, and there he wrote The Triumph of Time, which Mr. Gosse maintains is “the most profound and the most touching of all his personal poems.”  He assured Mr. Gosse, fourteen years afterwards, that “the stanzas of this wonderful lyric represented with the exactest fidelity the emotions which passed through his mind when his anger had died down, and when nothing remained but the infinite pity and the pain.”  Beautiful though the poem intermittently is, however, it seems to me to lack that radiance of personal emotion which we find in the great love poems.  There is much decoration of music of a kind of which Swinburne and Poe alone possessed the secret, as in the verse beginning:—­

    There lived in France a singer of old
      By the tideless, dolorous, midland sea. 
    In a land of sand and ruin and gold
      There shone one woman and none but she.

But is there more than the decoration of music in the verses which express the poet’s last farewell to his passion?

    I shall go my ways, tread out my measure,
      Fill the days of my daily breath
    With fugitive things not good to treasure,
      Do as the world doth, say as it saith;
    But if we had loved each other—­O sweet,
      Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet,
    The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure,
      To feel you tread it to dust and death—­

    Ah, had I not taken my life up and given
      All that life gives and the years let go,
    The wine and honey, the balm and leaven,
      The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low? 
    Come life, come death, not a word be said;
      Should I lose you living, and vex you dead? 
    I shall never tell you on earth, and in heaven,
    If I cry to you then, will you care to know?

Browning, unquestionably, could have expressed Swinburne’s passion better than Swinburne did it himself.  He would not have been content with a sequence of vague phrases that made music.  With him each phrase would have been dramatic and charged with a personal image or a personal memory.

Swinburne, however, was a great musician in verse and beyond belittlement in this regard.  It would be incongruous to attempt a close comparison between him and Longfellow, but he was like Longfellow in having a sense of music out of all proportion to the imaginative content of his verse.  There was never a distinguished poet whose work endures logical analysis so badly.  Mr. Arthur Symons, in a recent essay, refers scornfully to those who say that “the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne’s form is apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance.”  But he produces no evidence on the other side.  He merely calls on us to observe the way in which Swinburne scatters phrases and epithets of “imaginative subtlety” by the way, while most poets “present