“The very veil of her bright flesh was made
  As of light woven and moonbeam-colored shade
  More fine than moonbeams; white her eyelids shone
  As snow sun-stricken that endures the sun,
  And through their curled and coloured clouds of deep,
  Luminous lashes, thick as dreams in sleep,
  Shone, as the sea’s depth swallowing up the sky’s,
  The springs of unimaginable eyes. 
  As the wave’s subtler emerald is pierced through
  With the utmost heaven’s inextricable blue,
  And both are woven and molten in one sleight
  Of amorous colour and implicated light
  Under the golden guard and gaze of noon,
  So glowed their aweless amorous plenilune,
  Azure and gold and ardent grey, made strange
  With fiery difference and deep interchange
  Inexplicable of glories multiform;
  Now, as the sullen sapphire swells towards storm
  Foamless, their bitter beauty grew acold,
  And now afire with ardour of fine gold. 
  Her flower-soft lips were meek and passionate,
  For love upon them like a shadow sate
  Patient, a foreseen vision of sweet things,
  A dream with eyes fast shut and plumeless wings
  That knew not what man’s love or life should be,
  Nor had it sight nor heart to hope or see
  What thing should come; but, childlike satisfied,
  Watched out its virgin vigil in soft pride
  And unkissed expectation; and the glad
  Clear cheeks and throat and tender temples had
  Such maiden heat as if a rose’s blood
  Beat in the live heart of a lily-bud.”

What distinct image of the woman portrayed does one carry away from all this squandered wealth of words and tropes?  Compare the entire poem with one of Tennyson’s Arthurian “Idyls,” or even with Matthew Arnold’s not over-prosperous “Tristram and Iseult,” or with any of the stories in “The Earthly Paradise,” and it will be seen how far short it falls of being good verse narrative—­with its excesses of language and retarded movement.  Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere that he could not have written an epic:  “he would have perished from a plethora of thought.”  It is not so much plethora of thought as lavishness of style which clogs the wheels in Swinburne.  Too often his tale is

  “Like a tale of the little meaning,
  Though the words are strong.”

But his narrative method has analogies, not only with things like Shelley’s “Laon and Cythna,” but with Elizabethan poems such as Marlowe and Chapman’s “Hero and Leander.”  If not so conceited as these, it is equally encumbered with sticky sweets which keep the story from getting forward.

The symbolism which characterises a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite art is not conspicuous in Swinburne, whose spirit is not mystical.  But two marks of the Pre-Raphaelite—­and, indeed, of the romantic manner generally—­are obtrusively present in his early work.  One of these is the fondness for microscopic detail at the expense of the obvious, natural outlines of the subject.  Thus of Proserpine at Enna, in the piece entitled “At Eleusis,”