ent as a poet, while dwelling with fine enthusiasm on the
'entire and absolute sincerity' of a whole section of poems in which the
sincerity itself might well have been taken for granted, is that
marvellous metrical inventiveness which is without parallel in English
or perhaps in any other literature. 'A writer conscious of any natural
command over the musical resources of his language,' says Swinburne,
'can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of this gift or
instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier of our age
must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing a musical
exercise of such incomparable scope and fulness as _Les Djinns_.' In
metrical inventiveness Swinburne is as much Victor Hugo's superior as
the English language is superior to the French in metrical capability.
His music has never the sudden bird's flight, the thrill, pause, and
unaccountable ecstasy of the very finest lyrics of Blake or of
Coleridge; one never wholly forgets the artist in the utterance. But
where he is incomparable is in an 'arduous fulness' of intricate
harmony, around which the waves of melody flow, foam and scatter like
the waves of the sea about a rock. No poet has ever loved or praised the
sea as Swinburne has loved and praised it; and to no poet has it been
given to create music with words in so literal an analogy with the
inflexible and vital rhythmical science of the sea.

In his reference to the 'clatter aroused' by the first publication of
the wonderful volume now reprinted, the first series of _Poems and
Ballads_, Swinburne has said with tact, precision, and finality all that
need ever be said on the subject. He records, with a touch of not
unkindly humour, his own 'deep diversion of collating and comparing the
variously inaccurate verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who
insisted on regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted
or achieved in it as either confessions of positive fact or excursions
of absolute fancy.' And, admitting that there was work in it of both
kinds, he claims, with perfect justice, that 'if the two kinds cannot be
distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician's
than with a sculptor's.' Rarely has the prying ignorance of ordinary
criticism been more absurdly evident than in the criticisms on _Poems
and Ballads_, in which the question as to whether these p