MR. SWINBURNE'S NEW POEMS.* Tins volume, we suppose, represents Mr.

Swinburne's glean- ings among his occasional work for many years. The first poem belongs in subject to his early youth, and though there is no clue to the date of most of the others, it is permissible to assume, from the variations in manner and thought, that they represent different eras in the poet's development. The first question which these verses raise in the reader's mind is whence came that wonderful spell which his earlier books laid upon young men in the " sixties" and " seventies." For it is quite certain that the present volume does not contain it. There is the same class of subject, the same metres, the same images, the same luxuriance of rhythm and metaphor ; but the magic has departed. We read the lines coldly and note obvious defects, miserably conscious that such treatment would have been heresy towards " The Garden of Proserpine." The reason is not wholly to be found in advancing age, for we have read again the first series of Poems and Ballads, and found their charm undiminished. The new volume, indeed, shows all Mr. Swinburne's weaknesses, and enables us to understand by deduction what constitutes his strength. His range has always been extraordinarily narrow as compared with other poets ; but the commonness of thought and monotony of fancy were redeemed at his best by a fierce lyrical intensity. He is, we fancy, the worst poet who ever wrote to order, because his peculiar manner, being specially adapted to intense feeling, becomes a little comic when the feeling goes and leaves it a mannerism. A large number of the verses in this volume seem to us to fall under this description. Though now and then the old haunting music leads us captive, we see the tawdriness of the

• A Channel Passage, and other Poems. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. London : Chatto and Windus. [7s.]

stage and the mean equipment of the orchestra. The illusion has gone ; the canvas shows through the paint and gilding of the scenery. And in the absence of true passion we are enabled to note one by one the constituents of his poetry, which no man carried away by his music could think about.

We note that there are few conceptions in themselves new or profound, that his style varies within narrow limits, and that his rhythms and cadences are also limited and mechanical. He writes much of Nature, but his writing is simply a mosaic of rather hackneyed anthropomorphic conceptions, a wild revel of " the pathetic fallacy." His images are scanty in number, and all concerned with a few old poetic counters,— love, death, suns, stars, and dawns. There are no surprises ; we know exactly what is coming ; we can guess the rhymes and accurately foretell the metaphors. Nor is there any real sense of mystery, the primary endowment of a good poet. The world which his verse presents to us is a noisy, high- coloured world, but with as sharp outlines and high walls as the world of a business man or a party politician. The facile verse glides from our memories easily, pleasantly, but finally.

Sometimes, indeed, we are pulled up sharply by an acutely false note. In a passage about S. Theresa he describes the little girl wakening her brother before setting out to convert the Moors :- "From the heaven of a child's glad sleep to the heaven of the sight of her eyes

He woke and brightened, and hearkened, and kindled as stars that rise."

Mr. Swinburne has so often written in this style of adult lovers that he forgets how incongruous it is to bring such a

conception into the picture of a child being wakened by his sister.

To say that Mr. Swinburne when uninspired falls to lower depths than the ordinary second-rate craftsman, who is never afflicted with inspiration, is to say what is true of any lyric poet, even of the greatest. The armour of Achilles, when the strength flags, is a positive encumbrance. Catalina and Burns, when they write to order in the manner of men who feel deeply, fall fully as low as Mr. Swinburne. But the modern poet unfortunately shows a partiality for measures which must be done supremely well or supremely ill. A poor performance on an organ is worse than indifferent execution with a tambourine. The first poem, "A Channel Passage," is written in a heavy, sonorous metre, which lacks the intricate richness of music that delighted the world in earlier works, and at the same time is unredeemed by any great beauty of cone eption :—

" Heaven's own heart at its highest of delight found utterance in music and semblance in fire :

Thunder on thunder exulted, rejoicing to live and to satiate the night's desire."

This is a fair enough specimen of the couplets, which leave the reader with the cold conviction that all this heady verse

and such epithets as " steam-souled ship " do not bring the mystery of a storm at sea one degree nearer to his mind. On the other hand, take a poem like "Hawthorn Tide," where the inspiration is present. There is nothing remarkable in the thought, but there is the old lyrical fervour, the fierce delight in the glories of the world, which transmute images

often banal and lines not infrequently overladen into fine

poetry. Good, too, on the whole, is the longest piece in the book, " The Altar of Righteousness," which is a hymn of that quest for the unknown God whom mankind is ever finding • and losing. These are stately lines :—

" Invisible ; eye hath not seen it, and ear hath not heard as the spirit hath heard

From the shrine that is lit not of sunlight or starlight the sound of a limitless word.

And visible: none that bath eyes to behold what the spirit must perish or see Can choose but behold it and worship : a shrine that if light . were as darkness would be,

Of cloud and of change is the form of the fashion that man may behold of it wrought;

Of iron and truth is the mystic mid altar, where worship is none but of thought. No prayer may go up to it, climbing as incense of gladness or sorrow may climb : No rapture of music may ruffle the silence that guards it, and hears not of time.

As the winds of the wild blind ages alternate in passion of light and of cloud, So changes the shape of the veil that enshrouds it with darkness and light for a shroud."

Excellent, too, is the short poem on his native shire, North- umberland, which has already inspired some of his finest verses ; and the lines "To a Baby Kinswoman" have all the delicacy and charm which we are wont to associate with Mr.

Swinburne's poems on child life.

There is one final group which contains perhaps the best and worst things in the book, poems associated with friends or written in connection with some historical figure or event. Few readers will find themselves responsive to everything in the somewhat miscellaneous collection of Mr. Swinburne's enthusiasms, and the still more varied list of his hatreds. The " Dedication " to William Morris and Burne-Jones is

good, but not so good as that other lovely dedication in Poems and Ballads. The political verses on Irish, Egyptian,

and South African questions are admirable as politics, but a little too violent and unrestrained to achieve the aim of the writer. His hatred of anarchy and detestation of Russia are strung too high, and the reader's imagination boggles at the infernal powers with which Mr. Swinbm.ne's enemies are hand-in-glove. The verses, however, on Cromwell's statue- " refused," says a note, " by the party of reaction and dis- union "—and on Nelson are noble and high-spirited tributes ; and there is one poem, the " Ode to Burns," which seems to us to be not only the finest thing in the book, but one of the finest things that Mr. Swinburne has ever published. Written in Burns's own favourite metre, it shows a restraint, an exquisite fitness of diction, a justness and acumen in praise, and, above all, a telling simplicity, which are rare enough at all times, and especially rare in this class of poetry. To him Burns is less the lyric poet than the satirist who broke the bonds of a false theology and raised up crushed and burdened humanity :—

" But never, since bright earth was born In rapture of the enkindling morn, Might godlike wrath and nunlike scorn That was and is

And shall be while false weeds are worn Find word like his."

And in the beautiful closing verses Mr. Swinburne attains to a height which is as far above his earlier manner, even at its best, as that manner is superior to such exercises as " A Channel Passage"

" Above the storms of praise and blame That blur with mist his lustrous name, His thunderous laughter went and came, And lives and flies ;

The roar that follows on the flame When lightning dies.

Earth and the snow-dimmed heights of air And water winding soft and fair Through still sweet places, bright and bare, By bent and byre, Taught him what hearts within them were: But his was fire."