Address on Literature and Aris. 127 



different music. No one author ever exhausts the possibili- 

 ties of noble treatment of a theme. Browning may go to the 

 heart of it if he will, but there is that in it which it is not for 

 him to win, and which may through another become to us 

 a precious possession for ever. From the same mine whence 

 he has dug diamonds, Tennyson will bring forth sapphires, 

 Swinburne rubies, and Morris emeralds. There is no classi- 

 fying ; each sings his mighty song, and for each there is 

 a several multitude of listeners whose spirits are most 

 attuned to his, who take his best and let his worst pass, 

 knowing that it is not truly and essentially of him. If we 

 think that a subject appeals to Tennj^son through its 

 connection with human sympathy, the hopes and fears and 

 strivings of men ; to Browning through the scope it gives for 

 mental analysis and the search for fundamental truth, we 

 might imagine that it appears to Swinburne not as plastic 

 material at all, but as a living thing, that it touches him 

 with an electric shock, flashing on him a sudden vision of 

 mystery and terrible beauty, sweeping around him a tempest 

 of passion, in which motives and their working may be 

 vaguely defined, and the sequences of thought be blended 

 and confused. While other poets enter into and possess 

 their subject, he seems rather to be caught up and possessed 

 by it. Hence he comes nearer to the old conception of the 

 poet, who, as Plato puts it, " creates his work not by 

 wisdom, but by a certain might of nature and frenzy of 

 inspiration, like soothsayers and prophets." It can be no 

 prosaic age which has born and fostered this Pindar of 

 passion-song, this singer of the heart's storm and the spirit's 

 rapture, those rare moods of exaltation when we are like 

 unto them that dream, when we tread on ether and think 

 by lightning gleams. It was fitting that in command of his 

 instrument, the rhythmical resources of language, in mere 

 word-music, he should be wholly without a rival. He has 

 revealed capacities for melody in our tongue that were 

 unsuspected before. Over his strings our stubborn English 

 floats softly as Italian, and trips daintily as lyric French, 

 and swells with an oceanic surge and thunder that we had 

 despaired ever to win from Greek. Ever since, flve-and- 

 twenty years ago, he shook our pulses with the thrilling- 

 sweetness of that hunting chorus in "Atalanta in Calydon" — 

 " When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces, 



And the mother of months in meadow or plain 

 Fills the shadows and windy places 



With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain " — 



