omething
too obvious, insistent, emphatic, too dapper, to give me more than a
slight pleasure; but it is possible that I am prejudiced by a dislike of
English anapaests (I am aware that the classic terms are not really
applicable to our English metres, but the reader will underhand that I
mean the metre of the lines just quoted.) I do not find these anapaests
in the Elizabethan or in the seventeenth-century poets, or most rarely.
They were dear to the eighteenth century, and, much more than the heroic
couplet, are the distinctive metre of that age. They swagger--or, worse,
they strut--in its lighter verse, from its first year to its last.
Swinburne's anapaests are far too delicate for swagger or strut; but for
all their dance, all their spring, all their flight, all their flutter,
we are compelled to perceive that, as it were, they _perform_. I love to
see English poetry move to many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly
with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic foot. Those two are
enough for the infinite variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our
poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old traditional and proved metres
that Swinburne's music seems to me most worthy, most controlled, and most
lovely. _There_ is his best dignity, and therefore his best beauty. For
even beauty is not to be thrust upon us; she is not to solicit us or
offer herself thus to the first comer; and in the most admired of those
flying lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish of herself. "He lays
himself out," wrote Francis Thompson in an anonymous criticism, "to
delight and seduce. The great poets entice by a glorious accident . . .
but allurement, in Mr. Swinburne's poetry, is the alpha and omega." This
is true of all that he has written, but it is true, in a more fatal
sense, of these famous tunes of his "music." Nay, delicate as they are,
we are convinced that it is the less delicate ear that most surely takes
much pleasure in them, the dull ear that chiefly they delight.

Compare with such luxurious canterings the graver movement of this
"Vision of Spring in Winter":

Sunrise it sees not, neither set of star,
Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune,
Nor strong sweet shape of the full-breasted noon;
But where the silver-sandalled shadows are,
Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar,
Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon.

Even more valuable than this exquisite rhymed stanza is the blank verse
which Sw