ry can give. As some one said of a
contemporary politician, they are "good, but copious." Even from
narrative poetry Mr. Morris has long abstained. He, too, illustrates Mr.
Matthew Arnold's parable of "The Progress of Poetry."

"The Mount is mute, the channel dry."

Euripides has been called "the meteoric poet," and the same title seems
very appropriate to Mr. Swinburne. Probably few readers had heard his
name--I only knew it as that of the author of a strange mediaeval tale in
prose--when he published "Atalanta in Calydon" in 1865. I remember
taking up the quarto in white cloth, at the Oxford Union, and being
instantly led captive by the beauty and originality of the verse.

There was this novel "meteoric" character in the poem: the writer seemed
to rejoice in snow and fire, and stars, and storm, "the blue cold fields
and folds of air," in all the primitive forces which were alive before
this earth was; the naked vast powers that circle the planets and
farthest constellations. This quality, and his varied and sonorous
verse, and his pessimism, put into the mouth of a Greek chorus, were the
things that struck one most in Mr. Swinburne. He was, above all, "a
mighty-mouthed inventer of harmonies," and one looked eagerly for his
next poems. They came with disappointment and trouble.

The famous "Poems and Ballads" have become so well known that people can
hardly understand the noise they made. I don't wonder at the scandal,
even now. I don't see the fun of several of the pieces, except the
mischievous fun of shocking your audience. However, "The Leper" and his
company are chiefly boyish, in the least favourable sense of the word.
They do not destroy the imperishable merit of the "Hymn to Proserpine"
and the "Garden of Proserpine" and the "Triumph of Time" and "Itylus."

Many years have passed since 1866, and yet one's old opinion, that
English poetry contains no verbal music more original, sonorous, and
sweet than Mr. Swinburne wrote in these pieces when still very young,
remains an opinion unshaken. Twenty years ago, then, he had enabled the
world to take his measure; he had given proofs of a true poet; he was
learned too in literature as few poets have been since Milton, and, like
Milton, skilled to make verse in the languages of the ancient world and
in modern tongues. His French songs and Greek elegiacs are of great
excellence; probably no scholar who was not also a poet could match his
Greek lines