asked by a citizen of a modern free country, is
thoroughly free except a fish? _Et encore_--even the "silent and
footless herds" may have more inter-accommodation than we are aware. But
in the pocket of the secondary poet how easy and how ready a word is
this, a word implying old and true heroisms, but significant here of an
excitable poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought and passion. This
poet, who is conspicuously the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the
poet of penury and defect.

And here is a pocket-word which might have astonished us had we not known
how little anyway it signified. It occurs in something customary about
Italy:

Hearest thou,
Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears,
The world has heard thy children--and God hears.

Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, so surely a handful of loot, as
the last thought of this verse?

What, finally, is his influence upon the language he has ransacked? A
temporary laying-waste, undoubtedly. That is, the contemporary use of
his vocabulary is spoilt, his beautiful words are wasted, spent,
squandered, _gaspilles_. The contemporary use--I will not say the future
use, for no critic should prophesy. But the past he has not been able to
violate. He has had no power to rob of their freshness the sixteenth-
century flower, the seventeenth-century fruit, or by his violence to
shake from either a drop of their dews.

At the outset I warned the judges and the pronouncers of sentences how
this poet, with other poets of quite different character, would escape
their summaries, and he has indeed refuted that maxim which I had learned
at illustrious knees, "You may not dissociate the matter and manner of
any of the greatest poets; the two are so fused by integrity of fire,
whether in tragedy or epic or in the simplest song, that the sundering is
the vainest task of criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and not be
compelled to divide his secondhand and enfeebled and excited matter from
the successful art of his word. Of that word Francis Thompson has said
again, "It imposes a law on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived that
fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of the maxim confounded? Or is
Swinburne's a "single and excepted case"? Excepted by a thousand degrees
of talent from any generality fitting the obviously lesser poets, but,
possibly, also excepted by an essential inferiority from this great maxim
fitting only the greatest