h what kind of smile the writer
of these poems reflects anew over the curiosities of criticism. I have
taken the new book and the old book together, because there is
surprisingly little difference between the form and manner of the old
poems and the new. The contents of _A Channel Passage_ are unusually
varied in subject, and the longest poem, _The Altar of Righteousness_, a
marvellous piece of rhythmical architecture, is unusually varied in
form. Technically the whole book shows Swinburne at his best; if,
indeed, he may ever be said not to be at his best, technically. Is there
any other instance in our literature of a perfection of technique so
unerring, so uniform, that it becomes actually fatiguing? It has often
foolishly been said that the dazzling brilliance of Swinburne's form is
apt to disguise a certain thinness or poverty of substance. It seems to
me, on the contrary, that we are often in danger of overlooking the
imaginative subtlety of phrases and epithets which are presented to us
and withdrawn from us in a flash, on the turn of a wave. Most poets
present us with their best effects deliberately, giving them as weighty
an accent as they can; Swinburne scatters them by the way. Take, for
instance, the line:

The might of the night subsided: the tyranny kindled in darkness
fell.

The line comes rearing like a wave, and has fallen and raced past us
before we have properly grasped what is imaginatively fine in the
latter clause. Presented to us in the manner of slower poets, thus:

The tyranny
Kindled in darkness fell,

how much more easily do we realise the quality of the speech which goes
to make this song.

And yet there is no doubt that Swinburne has made his own moulds of
language, as he has made his own moulds of rhythm, and that he is apt,
when a thought or a sensation which he has already expressed recurs to
him, to use the mould which stands ready made in his memory, instead of
creating language over again, to fit a hair's-breadth of difference in
the form of thought or sensation. That is why, in this book, in
translating a 'roundel' of Villon which Rossetti had already translated,
he misses the naive quality of the French which Rossetti, in a version
not in all points so faithful as this, had been able, in some subtle
way, to retain. His own moulds of language recur to him, and he will not
stop to think that 'wife,' though a good word for his rhyme scheme, i