Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/137

 flower of the landscape is slurred, but no flower is obtrusive; the painting is broad and minute.at once, large and sure by dint of accuracy. And there are wonderful touches on it of fairy mystery; weird lights pass over it and wafts of mystical wind; as here:—

There comes a murmur from the shore, And in the place two fair streams are, Drawn from the purple hills afar, Drawn down unto the restless sea, The hills whose flowers ne'er fed the bee, The shore no ship has ever seen, Still beaten by the billows green, Whose murmur comes unceasingly Unto the place for which I cry."

All this song of a nymph to Hylas is full of the melody which involves colour and odour, but the two lines marked have in them the marvel and the music of a dream. Nor is any passage in the poem pitched in a higher and clearer key than the first hymn of Orpheus as Argo takes the sea. As noble is the song of triumph at p. 217, which should be set by the side of this, to which it is in some sort antiphonal.

But the root of the romance lies of course in the character of Medea; and here, where it was needfullest to do well, the poet has done best. At her first entrance the poem takes new life and rises out of the atmosphere of mere adventure and incident. The subdued and delicate ardour of the scene in Jason's chamber, following as it does on the ghastly beauty of that in the wood of the Three-formed, is proof enough and at once with how strong and soft a touch the picture will be completed. Her incantations, and her flight with Jason, have no less