Be the sunshine bared or veiled, the sky superb or shrouded,
      Still the waters, lax and languid, chafed and foiled,
   Keen and thwarted, pale and patient, clothed with fire or clouded,
      Vex their heart in vain, or sleep like serpents coiled. 
   Thee they look for, blind and baffled, wan with wrath and weary,
      Blown for ever back by winds that rock the bird: 
   Winds that seamews breast subdue the sea, and bid the dreary
      Waves be weak as hearts made sick with hope deferred. 
   Let the clarion sound from westward, let the south bear token
      How the glories of thy godhead sound and shine: 
   Bid the land rejoice to see the land-wind’s broad wings broken,
      Bid the sea take comfort, bid the world be thine.

Verse of this kind may be justly praised for the sustained strength and vigour of its metrical scheme.  Its purely technical excellence is extraordinary.  But is it more than an oratorical tour de force?  Does it really convey much?  Does it charm?  Could we return to it again and again with renewed pleasure?  We think not.  It seems to us empty.

Of course, we must not look to these poems for any revelation of human life.  To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne’s aim.  He seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave.  The roar of the fire is ever in his ears.  He puts his clarion to the lips of Spring and bids her blow, and the Earth wakes from her dreams and tells him her secret.  He is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his own personality, and he has succeeded.  We hear the song, but we never know the singer.  We never even get near to him.  Out of the thunder and splendour of words he himself says nothing.  We have often had man’s interpretation of Nature; now we have Nature’s interpretation of man, and she has curiously little to say.  Force and Freedom form her vague message.  She deafens us with her clangours.

But Mr. Swinburne is not always riding the whirlwind and calling out of the depths of the sea.  Romantic ballads in Border dialect have not lost their fascination for him, and this last volume contains some very splendid examples of this curious artificial kind of poetry.  The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament.  To say ‘mither’ instead of ‘mother’ seems to many the acme of romance.  There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialisms.  There is, however, no doubt of Mr. Swinburne’s mastery over the form, whether the form be quite legitimate or not.  The Weary Wedding has the concentration and colour of a great drama, and the quaintness of its style lends it something of the power of a grotesque.  The ballad of The Witch-Mother, a mediaeval Medea who slays her children because her lord is faithless, is worth reading on account of its horrible simplicity.  The Bride’s Tragedy, with its strange refrain of