Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/133

Rh other sorts of poems, of which their respective originals might, as the Morning Star would doubtless assert—if it did not happen just at present to be 'shining in death, the Evening Star among the departed'—might be proud. Those ladies, for instance, of whose virtue Boccaccio is so careful to assure us (for their innocent little tales had resulted, it seems, in a nickname for him which was not altogether a pleasant one), if permitted to listen with understanding ears, might indeed have been surprised to hear how skilfully yet another of their ballads was 'blown with boy's mouth in a reed,' pulled in a northern and Puritanic clime and after so many hundred years. But we should not seem to disparage this gift of Mr. Swinburne's. It has its value, but not a value great enough to justify the prominence assigned to it in his first collection of poems. Here it is often little short of a trick, and often altogether an affectation. Now, how good and excellent a thing it is, brethren, to have a 'Masque of Queen Bersabe,' a real 'miracle play,' accurate even to this charmingly verbal extent:

He shut his two keen eyën fast And suddenly woxe big and brast E're one should tell to nine.'

The transition to phraseology like the following has,