Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/103

 final grace of a complete unity of spirit and style which is the seal of sacred art at its highest.

No choicer sample of Mr. Rossetti's delicate mastery of language—of his exquisite manner of speech, subtle and powerful and pliant to all necessities of thought—can be found than the verses invoking Love as the god of sleep to guide the shadow of the lover who invokes him to the dreams of the woman beloved. The grace of symbol and type in this poem has something of the passionate refinement of Shelley's. There are many several lines and turns of phrase in this brief space of which any least one would suffice to decide the rank of a poet: and the fine purity of its passion gives just colour enough to the clouds and music enough to the murmurs of the deep dreamland in which it moves.

With this poem we may class one sadder and as sweet, "The Stream's Secret;" the thread of thought is so fine, yet woven into so full a web of golden fancies and glowing dreams, that few will follow it at first sight; but when once unwound and rewoven by the reader's study of it, he will see the whole force and beauty of all its many byway beauties and forces.

The highest form of ballad requires from a poet at once narrative power, lyrical, and dramatic; it must hold in fusion these three faculties at once, or fail of its mark: it must condense the large loose fluency of romantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity; it must give as in summary the result and extract of events and emotions, without the exhibition of their gradual change and growth which a romance of the older type or the newer must lay open to us in order; it must be swifter of step and