Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/151

Rh several of high quality. Such are 'An Appeal,' or the first ten stanzas of the 'Epilogue,' which have loveliness—loveliness coloured and animated with 'the patience of passion.'

It is not necessary to criticise in detail the third portion, the subsequent work of Mr. Swinburne. There is positively no sign in it of any new development except for the worse. Indeed, if we omit that slight tendency to greater excellence in workmanship which marks the second period, there has been, as we see, no new development from the beginning. He began as a 'marvellous boy,' just as his master, 'our sovereign poet,' 'our supreme poet,' 'the great tragic and prophetic poet of our age,' and so on, began as a 'sublime infant.' The 'sublime infant' died a 'sublime infant' at the mature age of eighty odd; and the 'marvellous boy' is no less a 'marvellous boy' as the author of A Century of Roundels than of the first Poems and Ballads. Verily, these men have the unreflective gift of perpetual youth, an enviable gift indeed in a time which is nothing if not repressed and broken with the weight of analytical age. Mr. Swinburne's freedom from the restraint of