The great master of English verse, Swinburne is also a poet much given to parallelism; for he has found it of incomparable use to him in managing new forms of verse.  He uses it in an immense variety of ways—­ways impossible to Japanese poets or to Finnish poets; and the splendour of the results can not be imitated in another language.  But his case is interesting.  The most primitive methods of Finnish poetry, and of ancient poetry in general, coming into his hands, are reproduced into music.  I propose to make a few quotations, in illustration.  Here are some lines from “Atalanta in Calydon”; they are only parallelisms, but how magnificent they are!

  When thou dravest the men
    Of the chosen of Thrace,
  None turned him again,
    Nor endured he thy face
  Close round with the blush of the battle, with light from a
          terrible place.

Look again at the following lines from “A Song in Time of Revolution”: 

  There is none of them all that is whole; their lips gape open for
          breath;
  They are clothed with sickness of soul, and the shape of the shadow
          of death.

  The wind is thwart in their feet; it is full of the shouting of mirth;
  As one shaketh the sides of a sheet, so it shaketh the ends of the earth.

  The sword, the sword is made keen; the iron has opened its mouth;
  The corn is red that was green; it is bound for the sheaves of the south.

  The sound of a word was shed, the sound of the wind as a breath,
  In the ears of the souls that were dead, in the dust of the deepness
          of death.

  Where the face of the moon is taken, the ways of the stars undone,
  The light of the whole sky shaken, the light of the face of the sun.

* * * * *

  Where the sword was covered and hidden, and dust had grown in its side,
  A word came forth which was bidden, the crying of one that cried: 

  The sides of the two-edged sword shall be bare, and its mouth shall
          be red,
  For the breath of the face of the Lord that is felt in the bones of
          the dead.

All this is indeed very grand compared with anything in the “Kalevala” or in Longfellow’s rendering; but do you not see that the grandeur is also the grandeur of parallelism?  Here is proof of what a master can do with a method older than Western civilization.  But what is the inference?  Is it not that the old primitive poetry contains something of eternal value, a value ranging from the lowest even to the highest, a value that can lend beauty equally to the song of a little child or to the thunder of the grandest epic verse?

CHAPTER XIII

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL ROMANCE OF THE MIDDLE AGES