What, then, is lacking to make Mr. Swinburne a poet of a rank even higher than that which he occupies?  Who can tell?  There is no science that can master this chemistry of the brain.  He is too copious.  “Bothwell” is long enough for six plays, and “Tristram of Lyonesse” is prolix beyond even mediaeval narrative.  He is too pertinacious; children are the joy of the world and Victor Hugo is a great poet; but Mr. Swinburne almost makes us excuse Herod and Napoleon III. by his endless odes to Hugo, and rondels to small boys and girls. Ne quid nimis, that is the golden rule which he constantly spurns, being too luxuriant, too emphatic, and as fond of repeating himself as Professor Freeman.  Such are the defects of so noble a genius; thus perverse Nature has decided that it shall be, Nature which makes no ruby without a flaw.

The name of Mr. Robert Bridges is probably strange to many lovers of poetry who would like nothing better than to make acquaintance with his verse.  But his verse is not so easily found.  This poet never writes in magazines; his books have not appealed to the public by any sort of advertisement, only two or three of them have come forth in the regular way.  The first was “Poems, by Robert Bridges, Batchelor of Arts in the University of Oxford. Parva seges satis est.  London:  Pickering, 1873.”

This volume was presently, I fancy, withdrawn, and the author has distributed some portions of it in succeeding pamphlets, or in books printed at Mr. Daniel’s private press in Oxford.  In these, as in all Mr. Bridges’s poems, there is a certain austere and indifferent beauty of diction and a memory of the old English poets, Milton and the earlier lyrists.  I remember being greatly pleased with the “Elegy on a Lady whom Grief for the Death of Her Betrothed Killed.”

   “Let the priests go before, arrayed in white,
      And let the dark-stoled minstrels follow slow
   Next they that bear her, honoured on this night,
      And then the maidens in a double row,
      Each singing soft and low,
   And each on high a torch upstaying: 
   Unto her lover lead her forth with light,
   With music and with singing, and with praying.”

This is a stately stanza.

In his first volume Mr. Bridges offered a few rondeaux and triolets, turning his back on all these things as soon as they became popular.  In spite of their popularity I have the audacity to like them still, in their humble twittering way.  Much more in his true vein were the lines, “Clear and Gentle Stream,” and all the other verses in which, like a true Etonian, he celebrates the beautiful Thames: 

“There is a hill beside the silver Thames,
Shady with birch and beech and odorous pine,
And brilliant under foot with thousand gems
Steeply the thickets to his floods decline. 
Straight trees in every place
Their thick tops interlace,
And pendent branches trail their foliage fine
Upon his watery face.