MR. SWINBURNE'S "STUDIES IN SONG." Ir is impossible to read

Mr. Swiuburne without feeling the conviction growing upon you that he is a greater writer than thinker ; that the idea is too slender to hold the magnificent tide of poetic expression which comes flowing on unin- terruptedly, breaking down its too narrow banks of thorght. It is here we touch the weak place in Mr. Swinburne's genius. He has no curious nor profound thoughts to explain, and ho appears to have never come in contact with the world, he knows nothing of its sorrows, its delights, its hopes ; at least he cannot identify himself with them, and mould them into poems, as Mr. Tennyson or Mr. Browning. He, therefore, stands apart, and sings of grief, love, hate, hope, and despair as abstract sentiments. The love of a special man for a special:woman is hardly attempted. Our sentiments can be counted on our fingers. It is for this reason that the great masters have sought to obtain variety and interest by character-drawing,—by the study, political, social, or simply picturesque, in the middle of which the action passes. It is, therefore, evident that the artist who limits himself to the abstract soon finds himself at the end of his tether. Love, hate, hope, and despair have been sung of in the first volume; in the second, third, and fourth, he sings of them again, in a different set of phrases; but after a little time this becomes no more fruitful in surprises than a game of dominoes. This is exactly Mr. Swinburne's present position ; he has sung of the strength of the sea and of death, and he sings of them again precisely as he sang of them before. A sot of phrases has been learned, containing certain tricks of alliteration and antithesis, and these are repeated, apparently without aim, and sometimes almost without end. There is nothing exact, nothing complete, nothing true ; no observation, no delineation of character or sentiment ; nothing, either physiological nor psychological. The defect with which Mr. Swinburne started, namely, a want of knowledge and interest in men and their surroundings, and an inordinate love for the jangle and. gurgle of words, became mora and more noticeable in each succeeding volume. It has now reached a climax past which we thiuk it cannot go, for he has almost taken to reprinting his verse from one volume into

* Studio] in Song. By Algernon, Charles Swinburne. Loudon; Matte and

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the other. In By the North Sea something is described to the. following effect :—

"The delight that he takes but in living

Is more than of all things that live : For the world that has all things for giving Has nothing so goodly to give : But more than delight his desire is, For the goal where his pinions would be is immortal as air or as fire is, Immense as the sea."

Of the meaning of this we have not the least idea ; it appears

to us to be unsustained even by the thinnest thread of thought. But turning back to a former volume, Songs of the Springticle, we find in the garden of Cymodoce the following strophic, and many more exactly like it :— "By what rapture of rage, by what vision Of a heavenlier Heaven than above, Was he moved to devise thy division From the land as a rest for his love ? As a nest where his wings would remeasure The ways where of old they would be, AB a bride-bed upbuilt for his pleasure By sea-rook and sea ?"

These are not stanzas taken from the same poem, nor from the same volume of poems, nor, to judge by the titles, from poems on the same subject, yet there is searcely any difference between thorn in music or colour. We do not know upon what grounds such repetition can be defended, unless on that of the philosophy of Mr. Browning's wise thrush :—

"He sings each song twice over,

Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture."

The most considerable poem in the present volume, as far as length is concerned, is " Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Lander." It is written in a Bixteeu-line stanza, with a complicated arrangement of long and short lines, and it consists of fifty such strophes. Indeed, we cannot guess why Mr. Swinburne did not write double the number, for'

such an arrangement would, at all events, have presented some- analogy with the subject. There is no internal evidence to show that it might not have been continued indefinitely, for it begins about nothing and ends as it began, and it is about the most soporific poem it has ever been our fate to read. Yet it is full of magnificent effects of metre, the lines are broken with singular skill, the rhymes chime in delicious cadence. The- versification of the first strophe delighted you ten years ago, even now it again extorts praise, but after the fifth you turn' over the leaves in despair. The monotony is dreadfully' fatiguing ; the same ceaseless tune runs through it all; we do. not even find variations on the melody, and as for a definite.

idea or sentiment, it is needless to any you find nothing, even approximately, of the sort. Here are some few lines of' stanza thirty-nine :-

"No lovelier laughed the garden which receives

Yet, and yet hides not from our following eyes With soft rose-laurels and low strawberry-leaves, Ternisea, sweet as April-coloured skies, Bowed like a flowering reed when May's wind heaves The reed-bed that the stream: kisses and sighs, In love that shrinks and murmurs and believes What yet the wisest of the starriest wise"

&c., to the end of the sentence, which occurs some seven or eight lines further on. Then, turning back to the first stanzas.

we find :—

"As dropping flakes of honey-heavy dew

More soft than slumbers, fell the first note's sound From strings the swift young hand strayed lightlier through

Than leaves through calm air wheeling toward the ground:

Stray down the drifting wind when skies are blue,.

Nor yet the wings of latter winds unbound, Ere winter loosen all the _Mohan crew, With storm unleashed behind them like a hound.'

Here are lines from the beginning and close of a poem of nine. hundred lines in length, and in both instances we find nothing but vague allusions to flowers and blue skies. We turn over page after page, and find this, and nothing more ; and so the poem goes on, until it suddenly stops, and you shut the book, having received no more definite impression than if you had been listening to the wailing of the wind.

The next poem is a translation of Aristophanes"4 Chorus of Birds." Mr. Swinburne has well preserved the curious wit of the original, and reproduced all its beautiful choral music. The verse is full of the most perfect pauses and subtle changes ; tho, closing lines are a fine example, of both the wit and metro :—

"Winged fame is a bird, as you reckon : you sneozo,, and the sign's as a bird for conviction : All tokens are ' birds' with you—sounds too, and lackeys, and donkeys. Then must it not follow 'That we are to you all as the manifest godhead that speaks in prophetic Apollo?"

The next poem in the volume before us is entitled "Off Shore." How many different versions of this poem there are scattered through Mr. Swinburnots many volumes of verse we cannot undertake to say ; we know that we have read it in every possible variety of metro and rhyme. This last example is no worse and no better than those that preceded, and those that will, we fear, succeed it. It is full of subtle imagination, as far as the choice of an adjective or rhyme is concerned. To criticise it is impossible; it ends as it began, with a marvellous combination of words meaning nothing, suggesting nothing. One of the best original poems in the volume we take to be " Evening on the Broads ;" as verse, it ranks with the "Chorus of Birds." Although the subject is slight, yet there is a certain construction and movement towards an end. The changes in the sky, that fade from gold to grey and grey to gold, the delicate, ever-shifting harmonies of the purple clouds, the lines of yellow and splashes of lilac, the infinite azure overhead, and the wild heath blowing in the chill evening breeze, are well observed, arranged in beautiful sequence, and worked up in a wonderful symphony of light colour and music. Yet the descriptions, although lovely, are hardly more definite than those in Beet- hoven's "Pastoral Symphony,"—it is all too far removed from the earth,— " Northward, lonely for miles, ere ever a village begin."

"Village,"—the word sounds strange, amid the long rhetorical passages which surround it, and amid them the homely word is like an oasis in a desert ; it brings us back to the earth, it re- minds us of something human. The opening lines are as fair a sample of the poem as we can select. They well show the sin- gukar skill with which Mr. Swinburno breaks and varies the long line Over two slindowless waters, adrift as a pinnace in peril,

Hangs as in heavy suspense, charged with irresolute light, Softly the soul of the sunset, upholden awhile on the sterile Waves and wnates of the land, half repossessed by the night. Inland glimmer the shallows asleep and far in the breathless Twilight : yonder the depths darken afar and asleep."

It is impossible to read such verse as this without being moved by the splendour of the rushing words, but as the poem goes on the luxuriance of the language begins to pall, and it is impos- sible to refrain from wishing for something more ; but the desire has no time to strengthen, for the poem is not long, and so

magnificent is the metre, that it almost carries you on to the end.

We do not escape it4 the present volume from that wordy political invective which Mr. Swinburne, since his Songs before Sunrise, considers as part of his poetic mission. Surely these vague and wordy attacks upon the Czar are utterly devoid of interest to the poetic reader, and to the political reader, who looks at things generally from a more practical point of view, they must appear the most absurd rhapsodies possible to imagine.

The book concludes with a poem, some forty-six pages long, entitled, "By the North Sea." It is divided into seven parts. These divisions lead the reader on opening the book to suppose that the au thor, in this in stance, has taken the trouble to construct and contrast the various parts of his poem, but a cursory glance shows that such is not the case ; for beyond the fact that the different divisions are numbered, and the occasional change in the metre, there is no variety or movement,-7-the poem ends where it began. It would road as well were the stanzas to be written on separate slips of paper, and the poem arranged as they were drawn out of a bag. Here is the first stanza A land that is lonelier than ruin ;

A sea that is stranger than death : Far fields that a rose never blew in, Wan wastes where the winds lack breath; Waste endless and boundless and flowerless But of marsh-blossoms fruitless as free Whore earth lies exhausted, as powerless To strive with the sea."

Of the beauty of this stanza, when read by itself, there can be no doubt, but when it is repeated until the end of the poem, fifty pages ahead, is reached, the monotony would be unbear- able, were the dullness not relieved by repetitions so flagrant and absurd that you are inclined to consider the whole thing as

a joke. Twenty pages from the first verse we come upon the

following

A land that is thirstier than ruin; A sea that is hungrier than death ; lien.ped hills that a tree never grow in, Wide sands where the wave draws breath; All solace is here for the spirit That over for ever may be For the soul of thy son to inherit,

My mother, my sea."

These verses are not used during the course of the poem as a refrain,—there is no such intention. Mr. Swinburne, as he wont on improvising, simply forgot he had written the verse before.

This is clear, from the fact that all the others are equally alike, although they do not quite so absurdly repeat the same words. If these descriptions of loneliness and. ruin had been dramatised by the introduction of any or even the memory of any person, we would hail this poem as a noble subject nobly treated ; but as it stands, it is as waste and as lonely of thought as the North Sea is of vegetation ; its metre and rhyme may be corn- pared to the splash of the waves and the glitter of the foam.

To conclude, we say that we admire Mr. Swinburne's best work probably as much as his most frantic admirers, but we refuse to speak of any of the poems in his two last volumes as equal, or anything like equal, to his earlier work. If Mr. Swim-

burne wants to write new poems that will live, lie must go back to nature, for the poetic reading public will no longer listen to his abstractions,