“—­she lying down, red flowers
  Made their sharp little shadows on her sides.”

“Endymion” is, perhaps, partly responsible for this exaggeration of the picturesque, and in Swinburne, as in Keats, the habit is due to an excessive impressibility by all forms of sensuous beauty.  It is a sign of riches, but of riches which smother their possessor.  It is impossible to fancy Chaucer or Goethe, or any large, healthy mind dealing thus by its theme.  Or, indeed, contrast the whole passage from “At Eleusis” with the mention of the rape of Proserpine in the “Winter’s Tale” and in “Paradise Lost.”

Another Pre-Raphaelite trait is that over-intensify of spirit and sense which was not quite wholesome in Rossetti, but which manifested itself in Swinburne in a morbid eroticism.  The first series of “Poems and Ballads” was reprinted in America as “Laus Veneris.”  The name-poem was a version of the Tannhaeuser legend, a powerful but sultry study of animal passion, and it set the key of the whole volume.  It is hardly necessary to say of the singer of the wonderful choruses in “Atalanta” and the equally wonderful hexameters of “Hesperia,” that his imagination has turned most persistently to the antique, and that a very small share of his work is to be brought under any narrowly romantic formula.  But there are a few noteworthy experiments in mediaevalism included among these early lyrics.  “A Christmas Carol” is a ballad of burdens, suggested by a drawing of Rossetti’s, and full of the Pre-Raphaelite colour.  The inevitable damsels, or bower maidens, are combing out the queen’s hair with golden combs, while she sings a song of God’s mother; how she, too, had three women for her bed-chamber—­

  “The first two were the two Maries,
  The third was Magdalen,” [58]

who “was the likest God”; and how Joseph, who, likewise had three workmen, Peter, Paul, and John, said to the Virgin in regular ballad style: 

  “If your child be none other man’s,
    But if it be very mine,
  The bedstead shall be gold two spans,
    The bedfoot silver fine.”

“The Masque of Queen Bersabe” is a miracle play, and imitates the rough naivete of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stage directions and innocent anachronisms.  Nathan recommends King David to hear a mass.  All the dramatis personae swear by Godis rood, by Paulis head, and Peter’s soul, except “Secundus Miles” (Paganus quidam), a bad man—­a species of Vice—­who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally carried off by the comic devil: 

  “S.  M. I rede you in the devil’s name,
          Ye come not here to make men game;
          By Termagaunt that maketh grame,
          I shall to-bete thine head.
          Hic Diabolus capiat eum.” [59]