THE POETRY OF SWINBURNE. 5 



most effective way of saying a thing. Fancy anyone trying to put 

 into prose all that is expressed in ' Break, Break, Break,' or ' Tears, 

 Idle Tears ! Now, in far too much of his work Swinburne is writ- 

 ing verse without having anything to say — there is no solid basis of 

 thought. Of course I am not arguing that a poem must have a 

 moral that can be twisted into a lesson, though it would be difficult 

 to write a poem that could escape the ingenuity of a certain type of 

 reader. I remember once hearing a Public School Inspector say at 

 a Teachers' Association that Wordsworth's ' We Are Seven ' could 

 be very well used to teach children that they should keep graves 

 clean. Yet even the reader who cannot agree with my inspector de- 

 mands thought and feeling as well as melody in the poetry he reads. 

 So when he turns from ' Scots Wha Hae ' and Byron's ' Isles of 

 Greece,' lyric poems which give perfect expression to noble thoughts 

 that are surcharged with emotion, when he turns from poems like 

 these to ' A Song in Time of Order,' or ' Tiresias,' or ' The Halt 

 before Rome,' or ' The Song of Italy,' I venture to think he will 

 disagree with Mr. James Douglas, who writes in the Athenaeum of 

 April 17th that these " and many another incendiary ode and sonnet 

 will be read when the French Revolution is a wraith of history and 

 United Italy a ghost of politics." That seems extravagant of such 

 verse as : 



'When the devil's riddle is mastered 



And the galley-bench creaks with a Pope, 

 We shall see Buonaparte the bastard 

 Kick heels with his throat in a rope.' 



A large proportion, a very large proportion, of Swinburne's 

 poetry has the love of man and woman for its subject. I have space 

 for only one poem, ' The Oblation,' but it is pronounced by one of 

 ■the critics ' the greatest love song in the language.' Here, if any- 

 where, we expect, besides imagination and harmony, at least emo- 

 tion: 



' Ask nothing more of me sweet : 

 All I can give you, I give. 

 Heart of my heart were it more, 

 More would be laid at your feet; 

 Love that should help you to live, 

 Song that should spur you to soar. 



All things were nothing to give, 

 Once to have sense of you more, 

 Touch you and taste of you sweet, 

 Think you and breathe you, and live, 

 Swept of your wings as they soar. 

 Trodden by chance of your feet. 



