Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/116

 great; great as no other man's work of the same age and country. Out of the beautiful old tradition of Helen, which tells of her offering on a shrine at Sparta of a cup modelled upon the mould of her own breast, the poet has carved a graven image of song as tangible and lovely as the oblation itself; and this cup he has filled with the wine of love and fire of destruction, so that in the Spartan temple we feel a forecast of light and heat from the future Trojan flame. These two poems have the fiery concentration and condensation of the ballad; but they have a higher rapture of imagination, a more ardent affluence of colour and strenuous dilation of spirit, than a ballad can properly contain; their wings of words beat and burn at fuller expansion through a keener air. The song of Lilith has all the beauty and glory and force in it of the splendid creature so long worshipped of men as god or dreaded as devil; the voluptuous swiftness and strength, the supreme luxury of liberty in its measured grace and lithe melodious motion of rapid and revolving harmony; the subtle action and majestic recoil, the mysterious charm as of soundless music that hangs about a serpent as it stirs or springs. Never was nobler blood infused into the veins of an old legend than into this of the first wife of Adam, changing shapes with the snake her lover, that in his likeness she may tempt the mother of men. The passion of the cast-off temptress, in whose nets of woven hair all the souls are entangled of her rival's sons through all their generations, has such actual and instant flame of wrath and brilliance of blood and fragrance of breath in it, that we feel face to face the very vision of the old tale, and no symbol or shadow, but a bodily shape and a