For the rest, as time goes on, I more and more feel as if Mr. Morris’s long later poems, “The Earthly Paradise” especially, were less art than “art manufacture.”  This may be an ungrateful and erroneous sentiment.  “The Earthly Paradise,” and still more certainly “Jason,” are full of such pleasure as only poetry can give.  As some one said of a contemporary politician, they are “good, but copious.”  Even from narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained.  He, too, illustrates Mr. Matthew Arnold’s parable of “The Progress of Poetry.”

   “The Mount is mute, the channel dry.”

Euripides has been called “the meteoric poet,” and the same title seems very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne.  Probably few readers had heard his name—­I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in prose—­when he published “Atalanta in Calydon” in 1865.  I remember taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.

There was this novel “meteoric” character in the poem:  the writer seemed to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, “the blue cold fields and folds of air,” in all the primitive forces which were alive before this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle the planets and farthest constellations.  This quality, and his varied and sonorous verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of a Greek chorus, were the things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne.  He was, above all, “a mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies,” and one looked eagerly for his next poems.  They came with disappointment and trouble.

The famous “Poems and Ballads” have become so well known that people can hardly understand the noise they made.  I don’t wonder at the scandal, even now.  I don’t see the fun of several of the pieces, except the mischievous fun of shocking your audience.  However, “The Leper” and his company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable sense of the word.  They do not destroy the imperishable merit of the “Hymn to Proserpine” and the “Garden of Proserpine” and the “Triumph of Time” and “Itylus.”

Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one’s old opinion, that English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young, remains an opinion unshaken.  Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled the world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he was learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and, like Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world and in modern tongues.  His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of great excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could match his Greek lines on Landor.