Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/160



Verse stately as the step and radiant as the head of Apollo; not "like to the night" this time, but coming as the morning to the hills. How clear it makes the distance between Parnassus and Phrygia, the beautiful scorn and severe youth of the God, leaving for these long reed-beds and rippled lakes and pine-clad ridges of hill the bays and olives of his Greece; how clear the presence of the listening Muses, the advent of the hurrying Mænads, the weeping Olympus, and the implacable repose of Apollo. No poet has ever come so near the perfect Greek; he has strung with a fresh chord the old Sophoclean lyre; he has brought back the Muses from Phrygia even to Colonus;

he has watered afresh the fruitful foliage of that unfooted grove of the God, sunless and stormless in all seasons of wind or sun; and for him the sleepless wellsprings of Cephisus are yet unminished and unfrozen,

Even after his master, the disciple of Sophocles holds his high place; he has matched against the Attic of the Gods this Hyperborean dialect of ours, and has not earned the doom of Marsyas. Here is indeed the triumph