other the finest poem about the earth from the
heart of the woods. Even in Swinburne's work the series of nine ballades
in long lines which bears the name of _A Midsummer Holiday_ stands out
as a masterpiece of its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French
verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used
it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in
iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open
air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it
may almost be said, a new lyric form. After _A Midsummer Holiday_ no one
can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any
more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands of Swinburne an
acrostic would cease to be artificial.

In this last volume the technique which is seen apparently perfected in
the _Poems and Ballads_ of 1866 has reached a point from which that
relative perfection looks easy and almost accidental. Something is lost,
no doubt, and much has changed. But to compare the metrical qualities of
_Dolores_ or even of _The Triumph of Time_ with the metrical qualities
of _On the Verge_ is almost like comparing the art of Thomas Moore with
the art of Coleridge. In Swinburne's development as a poet the metrical
development is significant of every change through which the poet has
passed. Subtlety and nobility, the appeal of ever homelier and loftier
things, are seen more and more clearly in his work, as the metrical
qualities of it become purified and intensified, with always more of
subtlety and distinction, an energy at last tamed to the needs and paces
of every kind of beauty.

II

'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his
dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for
antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a
view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black
Friars.' In another part of the same epistle, he says: 'My first if not
my strongest ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly
unworthy of a young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the
pupil of Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had
left as a possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my
first book, written while yet under academic or tutoral authority, bore
evidence of that ambition in every line.' And indeed we need not turn
four pa