Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/118

 spun in the paradise of trust and thought; between the romantic poems and the romantic designs, as for example "Sister Helen" and the "Tune of 'Seven Towers, which have the same tone and type of tragic romance in their mediæval touches and notes of passionate fancy; between the poems of richer thought and the designs of riper form, works of larger insight and more strong decision, fruits of the mind at its fullest and the hand at its mightiest, as the "Burden of Nineveh" and the "Sybil" or "Pandora." The passage from a heaven of mere angels and virgins to the stronger vision of Venus Verticordia, of Helen, of Lilith and Cassandra, is a type of the growth of mind and hand to the perfect power of mastery over the truth and depth of nature, the large laws of spirit and body, the mysteries and the majesties of very life; whither the soul that has attained perceives, though it need reject no first faith and forsake.no first love, though rather it include in a larger comprehension of embrace those old with these new graces, those creeds with this belief, that any garden of paradise on earth or above earth is but a little part of a great world, as every fancy of man's faith is a segment of the truth of his nature, a splintered fragment of universal life and spirit of thought everlasting; since what can he conceive or believe but it must have this of truth in it, that it is a veritable product of his own brain and outcome for the time of his actual being, with a place and a reason of its own for root and support to it through its due periods of life and change and death? But to trace the passage from light into light and strength into strength, the march from work on to work and triumph on to triumph, of a genius so full