plendour of
language, a firmer cadence, there is also some indication of that 'power
to grapple with the realities and subtleties of character and of motive'
which Swinburne finds largely lacking in them. A newspaper critic,
reviewing the book in 1861, said: 'We should have conceived it hardly
possible to make the crimes of Catherine de' Medici dull, however they
were presented. Swinburne, however, has done so.' It seems to me, on the
contrary, that the whole action, undramatic as it is in the strict sense
of the theatre, is breathlessly interesting. The two great speeches of
the play, the one beginning 'That God that made high things,' and the
one beginning 'I would fain see rain,' are indeed more splendid in
execution than significant as drama, but they have their dramatic
significance, none the less. There is a Shakespearean echo, but is there
not also a preparation of the finest Swinburnian harmonies, in such
lines as these?

I should be mad,
I talk as one filled through with wine; thou God,
Whose thunder is confusion of the hills,
And with wrath sown abolishes the fields,
I pray thee if thy hand would ruin us,
Make witness of it even this night that is
The last for many cradles, and the grave
Of many reverend seats; even at this turn,
This edge of season, this keen joint of time,
Finish and spare not.

The verse is harder, tighter, more closely packed with figurative
meaning than perhaps any of Swinburne's later verse. It is less fluid,
less 'exuberant and effusive' (to accept two epithets of his own in
reference to the verse of _Atalanta in Calydon_). He is ready to be
harsh when harshness is required, abrupt for some sharp effect; he holds
out against the enervating allurements of alliteration; he can stop when
he has said the essential thing.

In the first book of most poets there is something which will be found
in no other book; some virginity of youth, lost with the first
intercourse with print. In _The Queen-Mother_ and _Rosamond_ Swinburne
is certainly not yet himself, he has not yet settled down within his own
limits. But what happy strayings beyond those limits! What foreign
fruits and flowers, brought back from far countries! In these two plays
there is no evidence, certainly, of a playwright; but there is no
evidence that their writer could never become one. And there is evidence
already of a poet of original genius and imm