ns and the ode on the Armada. 'By the test of
these two poems,' he tells us, 'I am content that my claims should be
decided and my station determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of
the term; a craftsman in the most ambitious line of his art that ever
aroused or can arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.'

In one sense a poet is always the most valuable critic of his own work;
in another sense his opinion is almost valueless. He knows, better than
any one else, what he wanted to do, and he knows, better than any one
else, how nearly he has done it. In judging his own technical skill in
the accomplishment of his aim, it is easy for him to be absolutely
unbiased, technique being a thing wholly apart from one's self, an
acquirement. But, in a poem, the way it is done is by no means
everything; something else, the vital element in it, the quality of
inspiration, as we rightly call it, has to be determined. Of this the
poet is rarely a judge. To him it is a part of himself, and he is
scarcely more capable of questioning its validity than he is of
questioning his own intentions. To him it is enough that it is his.
Conscious, as he may rightly be, of genius, how can he discriminate, in
his own work, between the presence or the absence of that genius, which,
though it means everything, may be absent in a production technically
faultless, or present in a production less strictly achieved according
to rule? Swinburne, it is evident, grudges some of the fame which has
set _Atalanta in Calydon_ higher in general favour than _Erechtheus_,
and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for
setting _Erechtheus_ above _Atalanta in Calydon_, the fact remains that
there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same
degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of
inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the
ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no
more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of
those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, to take Swinburne's
own instance, being remembered as the writer of the ode to France rather
than as the writer of the ode on Dejection. The ode to France is a
product of the finest poetical rhetoric; the ode on Dejection is a
growth of the profoundest poetical genius.

Another point on which Swinburne takes for granted what is perhaps his
highest endowm