SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 



ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers for 

 once, and to doff our critical nightcaps, in which 

 we have comfortably overslept many similar rumors and 

 false alarms, to welcome the advent of a new poet t New 

 poets, to our thinking, are not very common, "and the 

 soft columns of the press often make dangerous conces- 

 sions, for which the marble ones of Horace's day were 

 too stony-hearted. Indeed, we have some well-grounded 

 doubts whether England is precisely the country from 

 which we have a right to expect that most precious of 

 gifts just now. There is hardly enough fervor of political 

 life there at present to ripen anything but the fruits of 

 the literary forcing-house, so fair outwardly and so flavor- 

 less compared with those which grow in the hardier open 

 air of a vigorous popular sentiment. 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 conscious- 

 ness rests, in order that a poet may rise to the highest 

 level of his vocation. The great names of the last gen- 

 eration — Scott, Wordsworth, Byron — represent moods 

 of national thought and feeling, and are therefore more 

 or less truly British poets ; just as Goethe, in whose ca- • 

 pacious nature, open to every influence of earth and sky, 

 the spiritual fermentation of the eighteenth century set- 

 tled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic might 



