Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/135

Rh or a snatch does not make a poem. Take four lines like these:

Alas, but surely where the hills grow deep, Or where the wild ways of the sea are steep, Or in strange places somewhere there is death, And on death's face the scattered hair of sleep.'

Or the opening verse of 'A Leave-taking,' or of 'Itylus,' or of 'Fragoletta,' or of 'A Match,' or one or two of the verses in memory of Landor: all are of the purest note—we have none purer—but all are, as it were, throttled by their surroundings. Hugo's Muse reminded Heine of a pretty woman with two left hands: Mr. Swinburne's has four, and they all pile up materials at once! He justly calls his first book a 'revel of rhymes.' But unhappily the revel has continued. 'Laus Veneris,' the poem from which the first quotation is taken, has a hundred and six verses! Heine would have done it in under fifty. But Heine makes ornaments of his gold, while Mr. Swinburne uses it all up for goldbeater's skin. Let us pass for a moment to the book which contains Mr. Swinburne's highest lyrical efforts—Songs before Sunrise. The 'Halt before Rome' has forty-six verses: twenty-three, or even eleven, would have done. 'Before a Crucifix' might have found full expression in sixteen verses instead of thirty-three. In the second series of the Poems Poems and Ballads