Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/108

 earlier works, so full of his special grace and spiritual charm, which belong to the same period, if not beside the highest of his sacred designs, such as the Passover and Magdalene here as it were engraved and put forth in print among the sonnets for pictures, All these are most noble, and give once more a magnificent proof of his power to bend and mould, to inflame and invigorate, to carve and colour the dead forms of words with a shaping and animating life. Among them all the most utterly delightful to me is that on Giorgione's divine and transcendant pastoral in the Louvre: which actually attains to the transfusion of a spirit that seemed incommunicable from one master's hand even to another's. In the verse as on the canvass there is the breathless breath of overmuch delight, the passion of overrunning pleasure which quivers and aches on the very edge of heavenly tears—"tears of perfect moan" for excess of unfathomable pleasure and burden of inexpressible things only to be borne by Gods in heaven; the sweet and sovereign oppression of absolute beauty and the nakedness of burning life; the supreme pause of soul and sense at the climax of their consummate noon and high tide of being; glad and sad and sacred, unsearchable and natural and strange. Of the sonnets on the writer's own pictures and designs I think that on Pandora to be the most perfect and exalted, as the design is among his mightiest in its godlike terror and imperial trouble of beauty, shadowed by the smoke and fiery vapour of winged and fleshless passions crowding from the casket in spires of flame-lit and curling cloud round her fatal face and mourning veil of hair. The sonnets on Cassandra translate with apt and passionate