SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 191 



awakener cannot be over-estimated. It is a power which 

 belongs only to the highest order of minds, for it is none 

 but a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. The 

 debt due him from those who listened to the teachings of 

 his prime for revealing to them what sublime reserves of 

 power even the humblest may find in manliness, sincerity, 

 and self-reliance, can be paid with nothing short of reveren 

 tial gratitude. As a purifier of the sources whence our 

 intellectual inspiration is drawn, his influence has been 

 second only to that of Wordsworth, if even to his. 



SWINBURNE S TRAGEDIES. 



ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers for once, 

 and to doff our critical nightcaps, in which we have com 

 fortably overslept many similar rumours and false alarms, 

 to welcome the advent of a new poet ? New poets, to our 

 thinking, are not very common, and the soft columns of 

 the press often make dangerous concessions, for which the 

 marble ones of Horace s day were too stony-hearted. In 

 deed, we have some well-grounded doubts whether England 

 is precisely the country from which we have a right to ex 

 pect that most precious of gifts just now. There is hardly 

 enough fervour of political life there at present to ripen 

 anything but the fruits of the literary forcing-house, so fair 

 outwardly and so flavourless compared with those which 

 grow in the hardier open air of a vigorous popular senti 

 ment. Mere wealth of natural endowment is not enough ; 

 there must be also the co-operation of the time, of the 

 public genius roused to a consciousness of itself by the 

 necessity of asserting or defending the vital principle on 

 which that consciousness rests, in order that a poet may 

 rise to the highest level of his vocation. The great names 

 of the last generation Scott, Wordsworth, Byron repre 

 sent moods of national thought and feeling, and are there 

 fore more or less truly British poets; just as Goethe, in 

 whose capacious nature, open to every influence of earth 



