MR. SWWBURNE'S NEW VOLUME.*

THE poem from which this volume takes its name is an effort at descriptive poetry more ambitious and laborious than any- thing that we remember to have seen before from Mr. Swin- burne's pen. The "midsummer holiday" was spent, we gather, on the sea-board of Norfolk or Kent, with "east and north a waste of waters," near to,—

" Where the small town smiles, a warm, still, seaside nest."

• A Midsummer Holiday, and other Poems. Bj Algernon Ohs-lea Sainburl.e. London : Chatto and Windno. 1844.

The "small town" Mr. Swinburne does not enable us to iden- tify, though the "country road," which suggests a fine tribute to Chaucer, may be supposed to point to Kent rather than to Norfolk. Further on in the volume we find another poem, and this, too, one of the most carefully constructed of the whole number, "Les Casquets," which belongs to the same class. "Les Casquets" are seven curious rocks, so-called from the resemblance which they have been fancied to bear to helmets, which stand out from the sea between Alderney and Sark ; and Mr. Swin- burne has given some thirteen or fourteen stanzas to a description of their aspects in calm and storm, and nearly as much to the story, if it may be called a story, of a girl who, born and bred on the little islet hard by, finds herself overcome by the pressure and hurry of life, when she pays a visit to Alderney, "The lone, soft island of fair-limbed kine," with its "Small bright streets of serene St. Anne." Now, Mr. Swinburne's work always has some great qualities, and these, of course, are not wanting here. But we must frankly say that these descriptive poems are not, in our judgment, a success. They want precision of effect ; they are blurred ; they leave no impression as of a

realisable landscape on that inner eye for which the poet paints. If we may borrow an illustration from a kindred art, they re-

mind us of some of Turner's latest pictures, where, amidst a confused mass of colours, some one object, say the masts of a whaling-ship, stood out with something like distinctness to the eye. In Les Casquets," for instance, we can see the rocks, and we have a general impression of surrounding seas, now wildly stormy, now treacherously calm; but we have no distinct mental picture such as that of the sunset among the mountains, to quote the first instance that comes to hand, which we find in the ninth book of the "Excursion." Here are two stanzas which represent the poem with sufficient fidelity :—

" Of the iron of doom are the casquets carven, That never the rivets thereof should burst.

When the heart of the darkness is hunger-starven, And the throats of the gulfs are agape for thirst, And stars are as flowers that the wind bids wither, And dawn is as hope struck dead by fear, The rage of the ravenous night sets hither, And the crown of her work is here.

All shores about and afar lie lonely, But lonelier are these than the heart of grief, These loose-linked rivets of rock, whence only Strange life scarce gleams from the sheer main reef, With a blind wan face in the wild wan morning, With a live lit flame on its brows by night, That the lost may lose not its word's mute warning And the blind by its grace have sight."

The reader will see that these are crowded with images drawn from human emotions. Instead of using Nature, as was the wont of the older poets, to illustrate life, Mr. Swinburne is perpetually drawing similes from life, to bring out the colours and propor- tions of the nature which he seeks to picture. He may be said to make a rule of what strikes us as an exception when Lord Tennyson compares the waterfalls blown into foam-dust by the winds, and so "wasting in the air," to "a broken purpose." The result of this is a constant feeling of unrest, and we cannot help adding, unreality. It is a positive relief when, as in the last division of "The Midsummer Holiday," Mr. Swinburne gets away from his landscape altogether, and takes us into the region of pure speculation or feeling. We quote a passage, the finest, we think, in the book—and, we do not hesitate to say, one of the finest in English poetry—in which there is, never- theless, something like indistinctness and confusion until we are fairly past the effort to picture Nature :—

"Sail on sail along the sea-line fades and flashes; here on land Flash and fade the wheeling wings on wings of mews that plunge and scream.

Hour on hour along the line of life and time's evasive strand Shines and darkens, wanes and waxes, slays and dies : and scarce they seem More than motes that thronged and trembled in the brief noon's breath and beam.

Some with crying and wailing, some with notes like sound of bells that toll,

Some with sighing and laughing, some with words that blessed and made us whole, Passed, and left us, and we know not what they were, nor what were we.

Would we know, being mortal ? Never breath of answering whisper stole From the shore that bath no shore beyond it set in all the sea.

Shadows, would we question darkness ? Ere our eyes and brows be fanned Round with airs of twilight, washed with dews from sleep's eternal stream,

Would we know sleep's guarded secret ? Ere the fire consume the brand, Would it know if yet its ashes may requicken ? yet we deem Surely man may know, or ever night unyoke her starry team, What the dawn shall be, or if the dawn shall be not : yea, the scroll Would we read of sleep's dark scripture, pledge of peace or doom of dole.

Ah, but here man's heart leaps, yearning toward the gloom with venturous glee, Though his pilot eye behold nor bay nor harbour, rock nor shoal, From the shore that bath no shore beyond it set in all the sea. Friend, who knows if death indeed have life or life have death for goal ?

Day nor night can tell us, nor may seas declare nor skies unroll What has been from everlasting, or if aught shall always be. Silence answering only strikes response reverberate on the soul From the shore that bath no shore beyond it set in all the sea."

Of the poetry of rebellion against established creeds in faith and morals which we have been accustomed to associate with Mr. Swinburne's muse, we have here but little. It is chiefly represented by three sonnets to Pelagins, in whom the poet, knowing more, we should imagine, of that divine's negations than of his affirmations, somewhat strangely finds a hero, seeing in him an antagonism which Pelagius, heretic as he was, would scarcely have acknowledged, to "Paul, faith's fervent anti- Christ," who, as Mr. Swinburne puts it, with scarcely his usual felicity, either of rhythm or diction,—

" Heroic, haled the world vehemently back

From Christ's pure path to dire Jehovah's track."

Some political poems need not detain us. They are of the kind of which the Roman satirist said," facit indignatio versus." Very good such verses sometimes are—where in Latin are there more sonorous hexameters than some of those in which Juvenal ex- presses his rage and scorn P—but they are scarcely poetry. Few things better of their sort have been written in these days than Mr. Swinburne's invectives against the House of Lords (" The Twilight of the Lords" is, perhaps, the best) ; but we venture to think that no one will care much to read them twelve months hence. A distinctly higher and more permanent interest belongs to the fierce protest of "In Sepulcretis " against the literary shamelessness which reveals to the world all the secrets of the dead. " Vidistis ipso rapere de rogo coenam " is the appropriate motto which the poet borrows from Catullns ; and he pours out his wrath with a vigour which Catullns himself could not have surpassed. At the opposite pole of thought are, ":Nine Years Old," "After a Reading," and " May-time in Midwinter," three poems of childhood, full of grace and tender- ness, and an exquisite In Memoriam sonnet, "On the Death of Richard Doyle," which, we venture to think, is unsurpassed in

its way :—

" A light of blameless laughter, fancy-bred,

Soft-souled and glad and kind as love or sleep, Fades, and sweet mirth's own eyes are fain to weep Because her blithe and gentlest bird is dead.

Weep, elves and fairies all, that never shed Tear yet for mortal mourning : you that keep The doors of dreams whence nought of ill may creep, Mourn once for one whose lips your honey fed.

Let waters of the Golden River steep The rose-roots whence his grave blooms rosy-red,

And murmuring of Hyblasan hives be deep

About the summer silence of its bed, And nought less gracious than a violet peep Between the grass grown greener round his head."

The rhythm of some of the poems in this volume has scarcely the effectiveness which we look to find in Mr. Swinburne's work. The ballad, in the French sense of that word, with its recurring burden, is apt to be tiresome. In some of the specimens, too, the lines are so long that all sense of the rhyme is nearly lost. Rhymes that do not strike the ear are a hindrance on the poet's freedom, which brings with it no counterbalancing advantage.