us with their best effects deliberately.”  It seems to me, on the contrary, that Swinburne’s phrasing is far from subtle.  He induces moods of excitement and sadness by his musical scheme rather than by individual phrases.  Who can resist, for example, the spell of the opening verses of Before the Mirror, the poem of enchantment addressed to Whistler’s Little White Girl? One hesitates to quote again lines so well known.  But it is as good an example as one can find of the pleasure-giving qualities of Swinburne’s music, apart from his phrases and images:—­

    White rose in red rose-garden
      Is not so white;
    Snowdrops that plead for pardon
      And pine from fright,
    Because the hard East blows
    Over their maiden rows,
      Grow not as thy face grows from pale to bright. 
    Behind the veil, forbidden,
      Shut up from sight,
    Love, is there sorrow hidden,
      Is there delight? 
    Is joy thy dower or grief,
    White rose of weary leaf,
      Late rose whose life is brief, whose loves are light?

The snowdrop image in the first verse is, charming as is the sound of the lines, nonsense.  The picture of the snowdrops pleading for pardon and pining from fright would have been impossible to a poet with the realizing genius of the great writers.  Swinburne’s sense of rhythm, however, was divorced in large measure from his sense of reality.  He was a poet without the poet’s gift of sight.  William Morris complained that Swinburne’s poems did not make pictures.  Swinburne had not the necessary sense of the lovely form of the things around him.  His attitude to Nature was lacking, as Mr. Gosse suggests, in that realism which gives coherence to poetry.  To quote Mr. Gosse’s own words:—­

Swinburne did not live, like Wordsworth, in a perpetual communion with Nature, but exceptional, and even rare, moments of concentrated observation wakened in him an ecstasy which he was careful to brood upon, to revive, and perhaps, at last, to exaggerate.  As a rule, he saw little of the world around him, but what he did see was presented to him in a blaze of limelight.

Nearly all his poems are a little too long, a little tedious, for the simple reason that the muzziness of vision in them, limelight and all, is bewildering to the intelligence.  There are few of his poems which close in splendour equal to the splendour of their opening verses. The Garden of Proserpine is one of the few that keep the good wine for the last.  Here, however, as in the rest of his poems, we find beautiful passages rather than beauty informing the whole poem.  Swinburne’s poems have no spinal cord.  One feels this even in that most beautiful of his lyrics, the first chorus in Atalanta in Calydon. But how many poets are there who could have sustained for long the miracle of “When the hounds of spring are on winter traces,” and the verse that follows?  Mrs. Disney Leith